“Tell me, then! I know that you are troubled by something. You have no mother, no friend. Tell me what is troubling you, and I will share your burden.”
“Nothing troubles me,” said Coral. “There is no burden.”
“You cannot fool me,” said Mrs Prence. “I know that there is.”
“I think you can leave now, Mrs Prence. Thank you for all you have done. And for your lovely gift. But please, I would like you to leave me alone now.”
Mrs Prence said nothing. She stood there as if frozen, with an odd, struck expression upon her face.
“Good night,” said Coral.
“Forgive me,” said Mrs Prence. “I was only trying to be a friend to you. But I am rusty in the ways of friendship and perhaps said something wrong. Forgive me.”
“There is nothing to forgive,” said Coral. She walked to the door and opened it.
After a moment Mrs Prence roused herself and walked with dignity out of the room. Coral closed the door behind her, and was alone.
* * *
Coral sat on the bed for a while after Mrs Prence left. It was very quiet in the house; outside, the rain fell, but inside the house, nothing seemed to utter, or move, and Coral hoped that by sitting silently and stilly on the bed, she might not disturb the diorama she felt she was in, for she did not want anything else to happen to her ever again. She could not imagine anything that was not bad or disappointing happening. She thought of the stuffed hummingbirds, frozen within their glass dome. It would be better, she thought, to have your insides taken out and replaced with sawdust, and have tiny glass beads for eyes, and be imprisoned beneath a glass dome.
The Major was taking a bath; he had told Coral he would continue to use his own bathroom and she could use his mother’s, which was en suite. She did not want him to find her dressed and sitting on the bed—she did not want him to find her at all, she realised—so she took the nightgown into the bathroom and ran a bath for herself. As the tub filled, the shadow of a body bloomed like a bruise along its surface—the result, no doubt, of many years of porcelain slowly abraded by flesh.
Coral undressed and tossed the petals into the steaming water. They unfurled and floated like tiny pink lily pads on the jittering surface. She watched them for a moment. Some gave up and sank slowly to the bottom of the tub, but many remained. She lowered her body gingerly into the hot rose-scented water.
Bunny, Mr DeVries had called her, pink bunny, cotton-tailed bunny. And other, filthy things. The children had a pet rabbit, a rather sad animal kept in a hutch outside the garage, with alarmingly large yellow teeth. She remembered how ugly Mr DeVries’s penis had looked, jutting up from him, red and angry, like an already bloodied knife.
She got out of the bath and dried herself. She lowered the stiff linen tent of the nightgown over her naked body. Skin a rabbit, her mother had said when she was very young, which meant she must raise her arms above her head so that an article of clothing could be flensed. Gruesome, really.
She sat on the bed and waited. She felt her body chill beneath the thin layer of linen, which she realised had been pressed hard and stiff by Mrs Pearce: it was not a gift but a punishment. A hair-shirt. After a moment she opened the drawer of the night table beside the bed and looked in at the jumble of crimped tubes and ancient bottles of lotions and unguents. Dirty bits of ribbons, and hankies, and nubs of pencils. A prescription bottle read: Mrs Edith Hart, take 1 tablet every six hours or as needed for pain. A wooden baby Jesus crèche figurine, missing his left arm, was stuck to an unwrapped piece of toffee. Coral shuddered and closed the drawer.
Someone knocked on the door. The Major. Clement.
“Yes?” she called.
“It’s me,” he said. “May I come in?”
“Just a moment,” she said. She felt panicked, almost dazed.
“Coral?” he called.
She sought refuge in the bathroom. “Come in!” she called, and then shut the bathroom door.
She heard him enter the bedroom. He was quiet a moment and then, almost plaintively, once again called her name, as if she might have escaped out the window or simply disappeared.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m in the bath. I’ll be right out.”
“Oh, darling!” he said. “Take your time. No rush.”
She heard the relief in his voice, and a tenderness, too. She had always considered herself a timid and sensitive girl, but suddenly, in comparison to him, she felt brazen and unkind. She realised she had been changed by the things that had recently happened to her, changed into someone she felt was other than herself. She looked at the mirror. Her throat was brilliantly flushed and a pink splotch, like ineptly applied rouge, decorated each of her cheeks. Her forehead was damp and glistening. She looked like someone with a high fever who had been recently throttled. She rinsed her face with cold water and then patted it with a towel, but when she faced the mirror again she looked exactly the same. She observed herself for a moment, as if some change might magically occur, but her reflection was steadfast.
When Coral emerged from the bathroom, the Major was standing in the alcove by the windows, swaddled in a dressing gown, contemplating his slippered feet.
She stood by the bed, and after a moment he looked up at her. “Coral!” he cried. “How lovely you are!” He held out both his hands, and although it was an instinctive gesture he could not help, it appeared to Coral as if he thought he was in a musical film and expected her to skip across the room, take his hands, and sing. He was costumed for such a role, or perhaps for a historical drama: his brocade bathrobe was as heavy as a topcoat and edged at every seam with silk piping; its shoulders were padded; braided frogs fastened it snuggly across his broad chest; a tasselled cord, as thick as a child’s wrist, was cinched at its waist, and its skirt fell almost to the floor, just above black velvet slippers that bore a golden crest on each vamp.
But she just stood there, looking at him, and after a moment he became aware of his awkwardly proffered hands and clasped them together. “There is something I must tell you,” he said.
“Oh—” she said. “Yes. There is something I must tell you, too.”
“It is about Hoke,” he said rushingly, as if he had not heard what she had said. “He is coming back here in the morning. He says he has enough evidence to arrest you.”
“The button?”
“The button—yes. And what you told him—that you had seen the girl, but said nothing.”
“Is that a crime?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “All I know is that he will be back here in the morning and arrest you.”
“And so?” she asked. She shivered and held herself tightly, trying to contain the chill.
“You’re cold,” he said. “Why don’t you get into the bed? It will be warmer.”
She looked at the golden coverlet drawn tightly across the flat expanse of the bed and neatly folded over at the top, exposing its voluptuous pillows, and it looked to her as if it were inviolable, uninhabitable. She shook her head. “No,” she said.
He seemed to understand her mysterious inability to disturb the bed and said, “Well, here, then, take my robe.” He unfastened the velvet frogs that held it closed along one side of this chest and then unloosed the cord that girded his waist, and shrugged himself out of the robe. He moved towards the bed, holding the robe by its padded shoulders. “Sit on the bed,” he said. She did, and he draped the robe around her. It felt more heavy than warm, like a lead blanket.
He stood for a moment beside the bed, watching her, as if the robe might crush or flatten her, but after a moment he sat beside her. Beneath the robe he wore navy blue silk pyjamas in the Cossack style; he looked quite handsome in them, if a bit absurd, like a character in a pantomime. She had the notion that they were bought especially for this night, and the idea of him shopping for them—for surely he had done it alone—caused an almost overwhelming tenderness to well in her, an involuntary response to the decency and gentleness of him. She almost reached out an
d touched him.
“What should I do?” she asked.
“May I ask you a question?”
“Yes,” she said. “Of course.”
“Did you—did you have anything to do with that girl in the woods?”
“No,” she said. “Nothing. Except for seeing her there that day. But nothing else.”
“So you did see her?”
“Yes,” she said. “As I told the Inspector.”
“Then why, for God’s sake, did you say nothing to anyone?”
She pulled his robe tighter around her. “I don’t know,” she said. “It was almost like a dream; I wasn’t absolutely sure I’d seen it, and I was so confused…”
“About what?”
“Everything!” she said. “About my life, and what you had asked me—and everything. And it disturbed me—”
“Then you should have told someone.”
“Yes,” she said. “I know. But I didn’t. I didn’t know how, or to whom, I should speak. And it went away, like a dream…”
“But it wasn’t a dream,” he said. “It’s come back.”
“I know,” she said.
“I think you must leave here,” he said. “Now, tonight. It is the only thing I can think for you to do.”
“And what shall I do?” she asked. “Where shall I go?”
“To London, I suppose. You said you had a friend there.”
“No, not a friend…”
“But someone you know. Someone you could stay with, surely, until…”
“Until what? When?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps they will find the boy you saw, or perhaps it was someone else, and they will find him. God only knows what will happen. So you must stay away until it does.” He paused for a moment and then said, “It would be best, I think, if I do not know where you are.”
Coral stood up from the bed and removed the robe. “Yes,” she said, “I suppose it would be best for you.”
“For us both, I think. That way I can be perfectly honest with Hoke.”
“Yes,” she said.
“I will give you money, of course.”
Coral said nothing.
“You can stay here if you would like. If you did nothing, and think your innocence can be proved, it is really up to you. You are welcome to stay here, if you are prepared for the consequences.”
Coral looked at him. “Is it a great relief to you?”
“What?”
“That I must go like this?”
“Coral! You misunderstand me. I am only trying to help you, protect you. I only just said you may stay here. My heart is broken, I thought we would begin a new life together—I love you!”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what to think.”
“It is because I am worried for you that I think you must leave. I want to protect you.”
“So you must banish me.”
“No. Can’t we— What do you want? My darling, what do you want? Do you want to stay here and face Hoke tomorrow?”
“No.”
“Well, then, what do you want?”
“What do I want? It is not really a question of that. I agree with you—it is best for me to go away now, tonight. All of this has been a mistake.”
“You think that?”
“Yes,” she said. “Don’t you? Especially now?”
“No,” he said. “When this horrible business is finished, I can be in touch with you, and you can come back here. If you want to come back here. Perhaps you will not. Perhaps it is you who are relieved.”
Coral said nothing.
“Are you relieved?”
“No,” said Coral. “How can I know? How can I know anything at a moment like this?”
He looked at her for a moment. “Forgive me,” he said. “I thought you might know that.”
* * *
The Major telephoned the Loftings and asked if Coral could stay the night with them, and could they drive her to the station in Leicester for the first London train in the morning? She could, and they would. They would drive round to fetch her right away.
The Major left her to dress and gather her things, as if she had many, or really any, for that matter. Her small suitcase, which had followed her to The Black Swan and back, had yet to be unpacked, and so stood ready for another journey. There was one thing she wanted, though: the sapphire ring. She would have liked to leave it behind her, forget it and the episode it represented, but she could not afford to, for it was the most valuable thing she owned, and it could always be pawned. She had secreted it in her little bedroom when she had arrived at Hart House, for she did not like to see it or keep it in her possession. She climbed the stairs to the third floor of the house and entered the little room that had briefly been hers. It was just as she had found it the night she arrived at Hart House, bare and unwelcoming, completely devoid of any warmth or colour or charm. She reached up and took the mirror off its hook on the wall and laid it facedown upon the bed. Her ring was still there, hanging from the wire that stretched across the mirror’s back. She untwisted one end of the wire and unthreaded the ring. How much was it worth? Perhaps not very much, but it was a real gemstone and real gold, so it must be worth something.
She hung the mirror back on the wall and sat for a moment on the bed, the thin mattress creaking the bedsprings. She put the ring on her ring finger.
* * *
The Major was waiting for her in the front hall when she descended the stairs with her suitcase and medical bag.
“They should be here any minute,” he said. “But come, sit with me in the drawing room.”
Of course, he did not want to sit with her in the library, because that is where their relationship, such as it was, had bloomed, and to spend their final moments together there would be excruciating. So they went and sat in the large, dark, cold drawing room, she on the settee and he on one of the spindly-legged chairs. He turned on a lamp but did not switch on the electrical fire. For a moment they said nothing, and then he said, “Oh, Coral, I don’t know what to say.”
“I know,” she said. “Neither do I.”
“I do think it’s best you go away now, but it’s so awful. It’s such damned bad luck, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Listen,” he said, “they should be here at any moment, but I wanted to give you this.” He held an envelope out to her.
“No,” she said. “I don’t need it.”
“Of course you do,” he said. “Please take it. I can’t let you leave without it. Please. If you don’t need it, you can always return it. But please take it.”
She took the envelope of money.
“When you are settled, you must write to Dolly and Robin and let them know how to contact you, and I can send you more. But don’t write to me—who knows what Hoke will do when he discovers you’ve bolted. And that way, when the coast is clear, I’ll know where to find you. Will you do that, Coral?”
“Yes,” she said.
They heard the crunch of gravel in the drive.
“Ah,” he said, “they’re here.”
“Yes,” she said. She stood up. She looked around the room, as if there might be something of hers to collect, as if she were about to leave a house she had authentically lived in. But of course there was nothing. There was nothing of anybody’s; it was that kind of house: the people who lived in it made no real impression upon it. But then she remembered the stash of excreta she had found in the bedside drawer upstairs, and realised that all these things were hidden beneath the pristine, impersonal surfaces of the house.
The Major stood as well. He wore a stricken look upon his face, and he, too, looked wildly around the room, but nothing in the room could help or save them. “Oh, Coral,” he said. “May I embrace you?”
She did not answer—it would have been too awful to answer him—but moved towards him and into his suddenly open arms and pressed her face against his chest. He still wore only his pyjamas and she could feel the war
mth of his flesh and the beating of his heart through their thin silken skin. Instinctively she raised her face and found his falling towards her, and suddenly their mouths and lips frantically answered one another’s. Then the bell chimed and they heard Dolly’s voice, and they pulled themselves apart.
PART THREE
Soon after Coral arrived in London, she found a woman who put an end to her pregnancy.
She wrote to Clement, in care of the Loftings, but heard nothing back. She wrote to him again a few weeks later, when she moved into a new room in a large house on Grantley Terrace, and regularly returned to the place she had originally stayed, to enquire for mail. But there was none, and her second letter, which had included her new address, also went unanswered. She wrote a third, and final, letter.
She was hired by the National Health as a visiting nurse, and it suited her well. It was good to see her patients in their homes, change their bandages, give them injections, bathe them, change their linen, even empty their bedpans, and then leave at the end of every day—leave and return alone to her little room with the bed and dresser and chair and gas ring and the trees outside the window and the sound of the piano coming up from downstairs. Madame Paszkowska, her landlady, was a pianist, and often played. Apparently she had been quite well-known on the continent before the war.
Initially, Coral was shocked that she did not hear from Clement, but then it made perfect sense to her: of course she did not hear from him. She never would. Dolly had certainly told him about the baby, and that, combined with the awful business with the girl in the wood, had caused him to be done with her. Perhaps he had sincerely meant to reconnect with her when he sent her away, but once she was gone, and it was over, he must have realised what a mistake it all had been. It had all been a mistake. It was over.
It was more difficult to banish Inspector Hoke from her mind. For a while she thought she saw him everywhere she went, and was sure he would be waiting for her every evening when she returned to Grantley Terrace. But then, slowly, she realised he was not going to appear, that if he had meant to find her he would have done so already—she had made no attempt to hide herself—and she understood that that burden, that shadow, was, like the baby, gone.
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