‘Quite so. I shall be here. The mortise is unlocked.’
Amy hadn’t time to judge his tone, because as she arrived at the end of the hall she glimpsed movement through the eye of the door. Beth was emerging from her flat. Amy seized the latch and pulled the door open, and found her mouth emptied of words. An ominously large bag was lolling against the wall next to Beth. ‘What’s that?’ Amy managed to ask.
‘Why, hello, Amy.’ Beth swept her blond hair back from her high forehead. ‘Just my overnight things. Well, a couple of nights.’
‘You’re going away too.’
‘Only to see an aunt I haven’t seen for too long. As well as Miss Ramsden, you mean.’
‘No, as the Goudges. You’re seeing Miss Ramsden on your way out,’ Amy assumed, and then a worse interpretation suggested itself to her. ‘You don’t mean she’s going as well.’
‘Mr Roscommon has had a stroke and she’s moving in with his son to help look after him. What’s wrong?’
‘You’re all leaving. It isn’t just a coincidence.’
‘What else would you like it to be?’ Beth said with untypical sharpness before she regained the sympathy into which her profession transformed her shyness. ‘Amy, don’t let it worry you. Some of us will be coming back, and there are still the Stoddards, and Mr Greenberg, and Miss Blake. Mr Shrift and Mr Inky Doughty, and our musician is Mr Kenilworth, isn’t he, and what’s his name, whatever his name is, the newspaper man.’
All this merely served to remind Amy how little she knew of these people or they of her. Nazarill was half empty now, at least of living occupants, and she thought she sensed the emptiness rearranging itself below her, rooms growing smaller and darker and more numerous and, worse yet, more inhabited. ‘Something is wrong, isn’t it?’ Beth said. ‘I’d locked up, but can I help?’
‘I was coming to see you for some of my pills. I’ve got none left.’
‘Oh dear.’ Beth started a gesture which looked as though it was going to bare her wristwatch, but which led her hand to the keys in her bag instead. ‘Our usual trouble?’
‘I was up half the night reading and gave myself a headache.’
‘Not the best idea to keep yourself awake reading, I find. Artificial light, you know.’ As if to demonstrate the drawbacks of that, Beth peered at her keys in the dimness of the corridor before inserting one into her lock. ‘What was the book? Something spicy, dare I guess?’
‘A kind of—’ The harsh sound of the key gave Amy time to reconsider how much she would have the opportunity to explain. ‘About the witches who used to be here,’ she said.
‘Ah.’ It wasn’t obvious how much of that Beth had heard or had wanted to hear over the noise of unlocking. She darted into the flat, from which Amy then heard the opening and shutting of two kinds of door, and out again. ‘Pay me when you see me next,’ she said, and placed a tube of pills in Amy’s hand as she wielded the keys again. ‘Take two whenever you need them and less of what hurt you.’
‘Maybe some writing has to hurt.’
‘Maybe,’ Beth just about conceded, and having dropped her keys into her handbag, stretched a hand towards her luggage. ‘About witches where, did you say?’
‘Here. Here in Nazarill when it was a mental place. They must have been locked up because people thought they were only mad.’
‘I suppose that makes sense.’
Now Amy found she wasn’t sure she wanted it to do so. ‘What kind?’
‘People stopped torturing witches around the time they started building asylums. I did hear this place used to be a hospital. The poor creatures who were locked up probably couldn’t tell the difference from being tortured. It was reading the history of medicine that got me into alternative treatment,’ Beth said, and fingered a sudden wrinkle in her forehead. ‘Did you say people thought these witches of yours were only mad?’
That was a great deal for Amy to explain, and she was considering how to start when Beth’s gaze flickered past her and tried to look casual. ‘May I intervene?’ said Amy’s father at her back.
‘Oh, Mr Priestley. We were just—’
‘I heard you.’
‘Oh, you did.’ Beth was as thrown by his abruptness as Amy was by his having sneaked the door open unnoticed. ‘And—’
‘I should be most obliged if you would refrain in future from discussing such subjects with my daughter.’
‘Actually, Mr Priestley, it was—’
‘Besides which, may I enquire what you passed to her?’
‘Just her tablets.’ When he seemed to be awaiting some clarification Beth said ‘The ones she takes.’
‘Perhaps you can tell me what they are meant to achieve.’
Amy gripped the container in her fist. ‘They make my head better. You know that.’
His stare wasn’t letting Beth go. ‘What I don’t know, or perhaps I do, is what made it worse to begin with.’
‘Mr Priestley, if you’re implying—’
‘It’s something bad she has been putting into herself, I know that much. If not from you, then from that evil shop that should never have been allowed to open, though I shouldn’t be surprised if it were a combination of both.’
Amy saw Beth start to lose her confidence. ‘I’ll walk down with you, Beth,’ she said. ‘I’ll get my coat.’
As soon as she was in the hall her father moved between her and the door. ‘Walk where?’
‘Rob’s.’
‘He won’t have risen.’
‘How do you know? I don’t.’ Amy raised her voice and shouted in his face ‘Coming, Beth.’
‘Actually, Amy, I’ll have to be rushing. I said I’d be on my way by now.’ As she spoke she was, her words dwindling along the corridor. ‘I’ll be back next week,’ she called, and was gone.
Amy dashed into her room and threw back the pillow. She tore off the pad the pages containing the material she’d copied and wrapped the Bible in them, and was stuffing the package into her bag as she grabbed a coat out of the wardrobe. ‘Wait, Beth,’ she shouted, and slammed her door behind her in the process of thrusting her arms through the sleeves while she juggled with her bag.
Her father was still between her and the corridor, his faint regretful smile as fixed as his stare. ‘She’s well away. She seems to have found some discretion at last, so there’s no further cause for haste that I can see.’
Amy jerked her coat around her and strode towards him. ‘How long were you listening through your crack?’
‘More than long enough,’ he said, and stretched his arms wide. He might have been waiting for her to run to him for a hug as she so often had, years ago, except that his face had never been the stony mask it was now. He was backing towards the door to shoulder it closed. She threw herself at him and at the last moment ducked under his right arm. He flung out a hand which struck a pop-eyed illustration, and she heard glass creak and almost splinter as she fell into the corridor.
As her free hand slapped the opposite wall for support the evasive illumination appeared to well up and subside like the flaring glow of smoky torches. She shoved herself away from the panel, which at least felt like wood, and fled along the corridor.
Her father’s voice pursued her. ‘Come back, Amy. I want to speak to you. Come back here this instant. I forbid you to leave this house.’ He was in the corridor, which amplified his shouts like a huge stiff mouth. They faded as she ran downstairs, though she continued to hear them on the middle floor, and had the dismaying sense that they might rouse the tenants of the abandoned rooms. She forced herself to run down through the clinging dimness to the worst floor, where she threw herself at the exit doors. Dragging them apart, she skidded onto the gravel beneath a sky sealed with cloud, into a dull light that was far too similar to the illumination within Nazarill, and raced along the pale facade to the car park.
Beth had gone. Amy glimpsed the tail of her white car flourished like a flag at the upper end of Nazareth Row before it disappeared. There were people by th
e few parked vehicles, however; Paul Kenilworth was taking his leave of Peter Sheen and preparing to climb into his Honda, in the back of which Amy saw a suitcase and a violin-shaped black box which put her in mind of a little coffin. ‘You’re off too,’ she said, in a despair so deep it was close to resignation.
‘On a welcome concert tour.’
‘Welcome how?’
‘I think it’s a sin not to use any skills you have to the full,’ the violinist said, and having shaken hands with the journalist, shut himself into the car and drove away with a chorus of gravel.
Amy watched the brake-lights signify an invisible gate before the car swung onto Nazareth Row. Some of her longing to be understood must have shown in her eyes, because Peter Sheen said ‘I’m still here.’
‘Can I talk to you?’ Amy said, straining to hear any sound that would betray the presence of her father.
‘I’d say you were.’
‘About something you might want to put in the paper.’
‘My ears are up,’ said the journalist, but for once seemed in no hurry to reach for his pen. ‘If it’s news, tell me.’
‘It’s history nobody knows about. That ought to be news, shouldn’t it?’
‘The history of…’
‘Here. Where we live.’
‘Oh, that. I don’t think so, sorry, not at all.’
‘But you haven’t heard it.’
‘I’ve heard enough. It could have been news before you went on the air with it, but that put the lid on it as far as we’d be concerned at my rag. And I may as well be honest with you, your father’s made it clear to various of us in the building that he wouldn’t be at all elated for any of us to be your, what word did he use, your dupe.’
Amy felt the shadow of Nazarill, pale though it was, inch more of its chill over her. She stared at Peter Sheen, who at least had the grace to look away, then she whirled on the gravel. A fragment of stone clacked against the facade as she bolted for the gateway, and she felt as though she had alerted Nazarill to her flight—not, she thought wildly, that it needed to be told.
She sensed it looming at her back as she hurried beneath the deadened sky into Little Hope Way. The growing distance seemed unable to reduce its presence. She turned up her collar and pinched it about her throat to fend off the cold that was trying to seize her by the back of the neck. In the marketplace several of the stallholders turned to watch her, none of them favourably. She ran past the bookstall, the proprietor of which was too busy serving a customer to acknowledge her, and down Market Approach, where the sight of the boarded-up frontage of Hedz Not Fedz struck her as one more triumph for Nazarill. Until she clenched her imagination the thought made the place feel capable of lowering the sky towards her, of narrowing the already narrow street or even walling off the far end. ‘Balls. Bollocks. Crap. Garbage. Shit,’ she declared, and more of the same, to convince herself she would arrive at the main road.
She ran across it, well in front of a lorry that nonetheless honked, and up the crumbling road to the cottages above the wall restrained by a cross. Her elevation only raised Nazarill to confront her across the too-small town. It appeared to be lending its pallor to the corpse of a sky, and she imagined it closing the sky around her like a cup over an insect. She turned her back on it so as to run up the path of the last cottage and ring the doorbell.
She had to press the button again—to lean her hand on it—before she saw movement beyond the whorled glass that occupied much of the middle third of the upper section of the heavy door. The colours under the blotch of a face were too bright and various for Rob, and the opening of the door confirmed it was his mother, a short grey-haired woman in a housecoat whose padded shoulders emphasised her angularity and breadth. The height of the hall relative to the path enabled her to look Amy straight in the eye, if with some visible reluctance. ‘Amy. We thought it might be you.’
‘Is he up yet?’
‘I’ve not heard him stirring.’ Rob’s mother kept her gaze steady while she raised her square-jawed face, then blinked. ‘I’ll be candid with you, this is awkward. We’ve had your father ring up asking us to send you home.’
‘You won’t, will you?’
‘It’s between you and your father. I don’t think we should get involved.’
This impressed Amy as little of an answer, but the way Mrs Hayward didn’t shift her posture was one. Amy felt paralysed by it and by the weight of the sky stretching from Nazarill, so that only the sliding of a sash allowed her to lift her head. Rob had opened his bedroom window to display his torso cloaked in a quilt. ‘Hey, I didn’t know you were here.’
‘Some people didn’t want you to know.’ Amy couldn’t stop her mouth from quivering, and her anger with her inability only aggravated it. ‘Well, I am, and I need to talk.’
‘I’ll be downstairs in five.’
‘I don’t know if I’ll be there,’ Amy said, and looked at Mrs Hayward, who heaved a sigh that bulged her housecoat. ‘He can walk home with you, Amy. Wait there for him if you like. Excuse me if I close the door to keep the chill out,’ she said, and did so at once.
Amy crossed the road to lean on the wall and challenge Nazarill over the huddled roofs. When she felt a shifting beneath her elbows she thought the bricks were about to topple into the main road, as if the solidity around her was being undermined, but the looseness was only of moss. She glared at Nazarill until the streets appeared to twitch, to edge jerkily towards it as though it was drawing them in, reducing the distance between her and itself. She couldn’t watch that for long, and so she occupied herself with stamping her feet and chafing her hands together until Rob hurried down his path. ‘What have you been doing?’ he said.
This sounded so accusatory that at first she couldn’t speak. Since he couldn’t have meant to be accusing, she wrapped her arms around him and the long black coat he’d bought in Charity Worldwide and pressed her cheek against his warm one. Her temperature must have shocked him; his cheek flinched, his long eyelashes fluttered. As she hugged him with all her strength to make him reciprocate, she saw his mother watching, masked with the net curtains of the front-room window like a yashmak. ‘Let’s move,’ she said, freeing him, ‘and I’ll tell you.’
They were on the steep downward track before either of them spoke again. ‘I got most of it from my mother,’ Rob said. ‘Is it me? Doesn’t he want you seeing me?’
‘It isn’t you, Rob. I don’t think even he could blame you for this. He can’t, he doesn’t know yet. I haven’t told anyone.’
‘Lateral.’
‘He won’t like it when he does know. It’s all about Nazarill.’
‘Tell.’
‘I found an old book, a Bible. It must have been around the place for, you’ll see how long.’ Amy halted at the foot of the slope. ‘I’ll show you. Wait, look.’
‘I will when we’re across,’ he said, squinting at the battered cover as she handed him the Bible, and stepped into the road. A pale hulk like a dislodged chunk of Nazarill rushed at him.
It was a furniture van. Amy dug her nails into the inside of his elbow through his coat and dragged him back against the rusty cross that held the wall. ‘Thanks,’ he said, and gingerly rubbed where she’d pinched. ‘Close.’
‘If that’s all.’ She held his arm more gently while she looked both ways twice before hustling him to the opposite pavement, where she rested a moment, clinging to him. ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’
‘Wondering what else you thought it was than close.’
‘Maybe nothing if you think so. I don’t care now, it’s gone. Let’s get away from the road.’
‘Like where?’
‘Anywhere but home. I’m not going back there, not yet anyway. Maybe not ever.’ Amy found that as difficult to conceive as it might have been if Nazarill wasn’t allowing her room to think. ‘I know, the bookstall. There may be things I can ask him now I’ve found out more.’
Rob paced into Moor View and held up the Bible. ‘Yo
u mean in here?’
‘Open it and see.’
He did, at Genesis. He narrowed his eyes at the margins and brought the book close to his face, and having turned the Bible three ways, blinked at her. ‘I can’t get it, Aim.’
‘I wrote it all out, look.’ She pulled the folded pages out of her bag and showed him the topmost sheet. ‘You can read that, it’s me.’
He let his eyes widen but seemed otherwise no more enlightened. ‘I’ll need to be sitting to read it if it’s that much.’
‘The pubs aren’t open yet, are they?’ Amy was reflecting on how few places to socialise Partington offered. ‘We’ll have to go in the tea place by the market,’ she said.
It wasn’t just its proximity to Nazarill she disliked, it was Tea For You itself. All the most intolerant old ladies of Partington congregated there, eyeing the market with inexhaustible disapproval out of faces like tissue paper that had been crumpled and smoothed as best it could be and then powdered, especially in the wrinkles. Even a stranger of their own generation would have been made to feel like an intruder, and as Amy set foot on the polished floorboards she became conscious of her thinness and her cropped head and every bit of metal in her face. The younger of the two waitresses in milkmaid’s outfits looked prepared to repel the invaders, but Amy had noticed an unoccupied though cluttered table for two in a corner, towards which she pulled Rob through a shaking of severely hatted heads and a clucking of tongues which put her in mind of an insect hopping from table to table, emitting its call at each one. ‘You can read while we’re waiting,’ she said loudly to Rob.
Several faces twisted away as though she’d slapped them, and began to murmur for her to hear. ‘Who do they think they are, I’d like to know.’ ‘What do they think they look like?’ ‘What can their parents be thinking of?’ The last comment affected her in more than one way, so that she rounded on Rob. ‘Ignore them,’ she said through her teeth. ‘Just read.’
‘I’m trying.’ He’d cleared a space among the lipsticked cups and the plates sticky with crumbs and jam, and was turning pages and swivelling the Bible on the pink-and-white checked tablecloth. When she flapped the sheets torn from her pad he only glanced at them. ‘I don’t need those. I’m getting it.’
The House On Nazareth Hill Page 28
