“Just like Melanie,” I said.
“Yes, I suppose so. Well, they got home and Melly seemed to settle down, and then Dr. Wilson rang at about half past eight. Apparently Janice had told him what was going on, both about Melanie now, and about what had happened at Arles when she’d run away from the circus, so he’d asked Melly if she wanted to talk about any of that. She was quite open about it, he said, and was talking without any sense of strain or unease, though just like Melanie she tended to get upset at any suggestion that the two of them are actually two separate people, and then all of a sudden she regressed. Do you know what that means?”
“Went back?”
“Well, yes. They use it in some kinds of therapy. The therapist helps the patient go back to an earlier phase of life, sometimes almost as soon as they could walk or talk, and remember what it was like to be that child, and things that had happened to them then. It’s more than just playacting—it’s as if they actually become that child …”
“Sounds interesting,” I said.
“I believe it can be,” she said. “But it’s not the sort of thing anyone should try without trained help. They probably wouldn’t get anywhere, but if they did it might be really dangerous for them. Anyway, Dr. Wilson wasn’t even trying that with Melly when it happened. Without any warning she collapsed onto the floor and lay on her back with her arms and legs flailing and screamed and screamed like a very unhappy baby. Babies cry quite differently from small children, even. It’s not a noise Melly could normally make, if she wanted to. Dr. Wilson said he had never seen anyone regress so far back. And she wouldn’t stop. He had great difficulty bringing her out of it. I think this must have been going on almost the same time that Melanie was having her outburst at the theater.”
“It would be,” I said.
“When she did come back she was still extremely upset,” said Mum. “She didn’t want to talk about it, but later on she told Janice that she’d been blowing around in an empty gray place and there’d been a small door she couldn’t get to …”
“You’re going to tell Melanie about this, aren’t you?”
“I expect so. Why?”
“Just tell her. Go on.”
“Well, Dr. Wilson said that it looked as if something extremely traumatic had happened to Melly very early in life, and that possibly it was connected with being separated from her twin …”
“That doesn’t work. It happened as soon as they were born.”
“But not as soon as they knew each other, darling. They’d been together for nine months before they were born.”
“You aren’t serious, Mum?”
“I am, as a matter of fact, but don’t let’s argue about it now. I want to get to bed.”
“And I’ve got to finish my homework. Go on.”
“There isn’t much more. Dr. Wilson said, of course, that we’d all got to be extremely careful about how we approached that period of her life. The same applies to Melanie, I should think. We don’t talk about it unless she positively wants to. And he also said that we should respect what the girls say about their meeting. If they believe it’s dangerous, however much they long to meet, then they’re probably right. We mustn’t try to push them into a meeting until they themselves think they’re ready.”
“He sounds as if he’s got his head screwed on. I thought those types were all nutters.”
“Just what your father would have said, darling. Well, I’m going to bed …”
“One thing, Mum. You’ve got to make sure Janice does come this weekend. It’s important. If Christine falls through again, I’ll go down and be with Melly.”
“That’s nice of you, darling. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”
It didn’t. Janice came, no fuss, and it worked out better than I’d expected. I’d been worried because Melanie had got used to plenty of hugs and cuddles from Mum, and Janice isn’t like that. Her train didn’t get in till after ten, and Mum took Melanie down to meet her at the station. When they arrived we had a hot drink and chatted for a bit in the kitchen, and then Mum and I went to bed to leave them alone. I was sleeping in the attic so Janice could have my room, so I didn’t hear them come upstairs, but Mum said it wasn’t till almost two in the morning.
Anyway the visit went all right. They weren’t actually easy with each other at once, but you couldn’t expect that. It must have been extremely weird for both of them. But they got on a lot better than I’d expected, because Janice is very prim and proper and has pretty old-fashioned ideas about a lot of things, and Melanie—she’d talked to me about this—had decided not to try and pretend that she wasn’t what she was. I don’t mean she swore and smoked the whole time, but she did a bit, and she was—well, Melanie, not Melly. The point is that Janice accepted it.
The other thing that happened was that Janice told us she’d found a private detective who could speak fluent French and she was going to ask him to go out to Arles and see if he could find anything out about what had happened fourteen years before.
“It isn’t going to be cheap,” she said. “But …”
“I’ll go half,” said Mum.
“I wouldn’t hear of it,” said Janice.
“Well, let’s talk about it later,” said Mum. “Go on.”
“There are two sides to it,” said Janice. “The first is that we can’t go on as we are, watching Melly and Melanie the whole time, worrying about them and so on. Something’s going to give, and give soon. We can all feel it. Besides, Melanie’s my daughter. I want her to be able to come and live with me like a normal daughter. And I’m quite sure that the more we know—the less of this beastly mystery there is—the more chance we have of getting things right. I don’t know how much this man will be able to find out, but he should at least be able to look up the birth records and so on. The French are very strict about records. I’m not insisting that Melly and Melanie are twin sisters, because they’re both so determined that they aren’t, but it’s still the only explanation I can understand. That’s one side. The other side is about me. Suppose I’d always thought Melly was my only daughter, and somebody told me that actually I’d had twins but one of them had died soon after she was born, it would still be very important to me to know if that was true. And since Melanie is here, and alive and well, and what’s more since she’s so obviously my daughter and no one else’s, I really have got to know how it happened. I don’t see how we can get things right between us until we know. That’s what I mean about it being a beastly mystery. I don’t like mysteries anyway, but this one’s going to ruin our lives if we aren’t careful. Isn’t it, Melanie?”
“Too effing right it is,” said Melanie. “Sorry, Ma. And we’re never twins, but we’ve got to know, still.”
The detective’s name was Eddie Droxeter. You’d never have known he was a detective to look at. “Some kind of third-rate poet with indigestion,” Mum said. He had a long, pale face and a big mouth and sad eyes and he was tall and thin but he wore baggy clothes and stooped as if he was trying to make himself look shorter and less skinny. He was expensive, all right. Over a thousand pounds for a week, all in. Janice only had what she earned—she was a buyer for a small chain of clothes stores—so that was a lot for her. Mum told me she hadn’t been able to persuade Janice to let her pay Melanie’s share, and she hadn’t pressed it too hard because she didn’t want Janice to feel she was trying to take Melanie over, but she’d got her to accept an interest-free loan of half.
I liked Eddie. I may have made him sound a bit of an ass, but he was obviously pretty bright. He came up to Scotland to talk to Melanie about the circus, because she’d known it till only four years ago, and been part of it, while Janice had always been an outsider. To cut costs he came to Glasgow on one train and went back on the next, and I took Melanie down to meet him in the station tea room, with other passengers hurrying in and out around us and the announcements booming away overhead.
He wanted everything she could remember, especially the names of an
yone who might be persuaded to tell him something.
“There’s none of them will talk to you,” Melanie said.
“Story of my life,” he said. “Not being talked to. I’m expert at it. Seriously. This guy won’t talk because he’s an obstinate cuss, and this guy doesn’t know anything, and this guy’s scared, and this guy’s got something to sell but wants to up the price, and this guy just wants another drink … All right, it’s a circus, so there’ll be acrobats. Let’s make a list …”
It was interesting to watch how he really got Melanie going, and coaxed her on without wasting any time but without hurrying her either, getting her to talk about the people, not just the names, but what kind of character they were, and remembering always that she’d been only ten when she’d left. I’d thought a thousand pounds plus was a lot of money for a week’s work and he probably wasn’t going to be worth it, but now I realized he might be.
At one point Melanie went off to the toilet and I asked him if he thought the girls were really twins, or something else.
“They’ve got to be,” he said. “I go along with the theory that the father concealed the birth of one child, for some reason, and when the mother ran off with the one he regarded as his daughter he came and took her away and brought back the other one.”
“What about things like the scars on their arms?”
“That sort of thing happens with twins. I can’t explain it. But, for instance, I was reading about twin brothers in America who’d been brought up separately, and when they finally met they were doing very similar jobs and wore almost identical clothes and their wives even had the same name as each other.”
“Weird.”
“There’s a lot of weird stuff about twins. Now, before Melanie comes back, what can you tell me about the father? He’s the obvious person for me to talk to, and barmen are used to strangers wanting to chat, but I’m leaving it till after Arles in case he smells a rat and alerts the people out there. He’s not entirely sane on the subject of his daughter, right?”
“He’s crazy,” I said, and started to tell him, but then Melanie came back and they went on with stuff about the circus until it was time for him to catch his train.
Eddie’d come up to see us the day before end of term. It was lucky it wasn’t any earlier, because Melanie went through a bad patch while he was away, and not having to go to school meant I could be with her all day long. I don’t mean that she was miserable, just incredibly wired and jumpy. Twanging from the moment she got out of bed till long after midnight, when Mum and I were dropping. She said her dreams were like that too, hurtling her along, strange and buzzing. She tried another of Mum’s tranquilizers but it scared her.
“I came kind of loose,” she told me. “I felt I was going to slip away out of myself, and wouldn’t ever come back. I’d be in that empty place, other side of the wee door.”
Then sometimes she’d go into a kind of daze, for a couple of hours at a time. I took her out bird-watching with Ken once, and she had a great time making out she was a French hussy—Ken’s so shy and proper he makes me look wild. He was interested in a pair of sparrowhawks whose brood was almost ready to fly and he wanted to see it happen, and this meant lying still on a grassy ledge, where we could see the nest, for hours and hours. I didn’t expect Melanie to stick it for more than ten minutes, but she barely stirred all afternoon. I nudged her when anything interesting happened at the nest, and she looked at it through Ken’s binoculars in a dazed kind of way, but I wasn’t sure she knew what she was seeing.
“Where’ve you been?” I asked her as soon as I could talk to her alone.
“Away,” she said. “With Melly.”
“In Coventry?”
“Aye. No. She was here too. The place was nothing. I can’t explain.”
“Was that … safe?”
“Aye. Like that. No problem.”
But mostly, like I said, she twanged, and it wore her out. When I’d first seen her she’d been exactly like Melly, and like Janice must have been when she was a kid, not fat, but a bit pudgy. Now she’d lost so much weight that you’d have said she was skinny, and her eyes were sunken and had that bruised look round them, but the eyes themselves glittered as if she was on speed or something, which she wasn’t, of course.
It was a great relief when Janice rang to say Eddie was back and he’d got news.
Now that school was out and I was home all day Mum had gone back to normal working hours, so we all got together in the evening.
The first thing Eddie had done was go to the mairie and look up the births register. He knew the exact day, so it wasn’t difficult, and he found that one baby, Melanie Perrault, had been recorded. That didn’t prove anything because M. Perrault might have registered the other one under a different name and there were a couple of other girls born around then who might have been the other twin, but he did a bit more research and found that they were both real people and still alive.
Next he looked for the circus. It was on the road, so he hired a car and tracked it down in a little town up the Rhone valley. He went to a performance, and after it he asked to see the proprietor and said he was a TV researcher who was doing preliminary work for a program about traveling circuses, and could he hang around with them for a day or two and talk to people? (Eddie had cards with the name of a bogus TV company on them—he said they were very useful sometimes.) He told the proprietor there’d be money coming if the program was made, so of course he was interested. He was married to Melanie’s aunt Sylvie, by the way.
So Eddie did what he’d said, and hung around, and took photographs of everything, and asked questions, and stood people drinks, and so on. He was very careful about the questions he asked, to make them seem natural, but he pretended to be specially interested in the animals, and because there weren’t any lions it was OK to ask if they’d ever had lions, and then why had the lion tamer left, and where was he now, because he might be interesting to talk to. Several people told him that M. Perrault had suddenly sold his lions and cleared out, and they didn’t know why, or where he’d gone.
“I was careful not to press it,” Eddie said. “That first day all I was hoping to do was suss out which of them to try and go a bit further with. It wasn’t going to be easy—I’ve come across professional criminals who were freer with information than that lot. But on the whole I thought I was getting along as well as I could hope, so I wasn’t really ready next morning when this fellow turned up. I was having breakfast in my hotel and going through my notes when he came up to my table and pulled out a chair and sat down without so much as a by-your-leave.
“I said good morning, but he just sat and stared at me. I asked if there was something he wanted but he didn’t say anything. I’d just about decided he was a nutter when he said, ‘There are these two girls, identical, now fourteen years old. They have learnt of each other’s existence and now desire passionately to meet, but they are also afraid to do so. Correct?’
“He’d got me right off balance, but I managed to say something about it being an interesting story, and was there any more?
“‘They do well to be afraid,’ he said. ‘They will have their desire very soon. You cannot prevent them. And when they meet they will die.’
“He hammed it up by snapping his fingers when he said that, and that helped me get him placed. Melanie had described him to me, but I hadn’t made the connection and I hadn’t seen him at all around the circus. But I’d watched his performance. He was one of the clowns, and his act was to do bogus conjuring tricks which always went wrong—you remember Tommy Cooper?—that sort of thing …”
“Monsieur Albert,” said Melanie.
“That’s right,” said Eddie, “but he called himself Albertus Magnus for his act, and at the critical moment he’d snap his fingers the way he’d just done. By now I’d got my wits about me enough to pretend I thought he was trying to interest me in a story for my TV company to produce, so I told him I’d need more, a lot more, before there’
d be a hope of selling it to anyone. We beat around the bush quite a bit, and that allowed me to get a bit of a line on him. I put him down as a charlatan, but he obviously knew something and he was prepared to sell it to me if the price was right. Tentatively I decided that he had probably helped in the original abduction …”
“No,” said Melanie. “Papa couldn’t abide him.”
“But Janice told me that he and your aunt Sylvie were friends,” said Eddie.
“Not anymore, they weren’t,” said Melanie.
“That’s very interesting,” said Eddie. “Suppose he had helped with the abduction, he might then have tried to blackmail your father. That would account for a change of attitude. We still have to account for his knowing so much about you. Now, I think I was told that when you last saw your father you started to accuse him of what he had done to you when you were a baby. Did you actually tell him then that you knew about Melly’s existence?”
“That I did,” said Melanie.
“Then he will almost certainly have guessed that you learnt about it from meeting Trish and Keith,” said Eddie. “And also that they must know Janice, and tell her, and that she would very likely want to know more. So he could well have written to his sister warning her that somebody might be making inquiries at the circus, in which case Monsieur Albert might also have learnt of it and decided to cash in on his knowledge. Most of what he said to me can be accounted for like that.”
“But not all of it,” said Mum. “For instance, how would he have known about the girls wanting to meet and being afraid to? That isn’t at all obvious. Anyone would expect that the very first thing we’d all want to do was arrange a meeting.”
“I don’t pretend to account for everything,” said Eddie. “I’m just saying that a lot of it can be rationally accounted for, so perhaps the rest can too. Shall I go on? I was still making out I thought he was trying to sell me a plot outline, and he was still ignoring that. After a while, to push the thing on a bit, I said that in any case my company wouldn’t look at his story unless it had a happy ending, and was there any way in which the two girls could be brought together without some kind of tragedy?
The Lion Tamer’s Daughter Page 19
