A Dark Dividing (33 page)

Some things you never told…

Such as murder—the kind of macabre, unintended murder that might have taken place inside a dark old house with revengeful ghosts gossiping in the corners, and a disused well breathing its ancient stench into your face.

But you cannot murder a ghost…

For at least a month after that day in Mortmain Simone had listened carefully to the TV and radio news, because despite what Mother had said and despite that second eerie expedition they had made to Mortmain together, she was still half-expecting to hear about a police search for a missing child. She could watch the six o’clock news each evening if she wanted; it was not a big deal either way, but Mother was quite pleased if she did watch it. It was a good thing to know what was going on in the world, she said, even though a lot of it was depressing. Simone did not understand everything although some of the things were pretty interesting.

But there was nothing at all about a missing girl in the Welsh Marches. There were no trembly-voiced people begging for their daughter or sister or niece to be returned to them, and there were no police appeals for information, or photographs saying, Have you seen this child? After a while she did not listen absolutely every night, and after a while the horror faded a little.

But the memory did not fade and the idea that the dead Sonia had tried to cling on to life using her twin did not fade either. It stayed with Simone, vividly and sometimes disturbingly, and the concept of children dying young and unfulfilled stayed with her as well.

In her final Slade year she composed a series of black-and-white-and-grey studies. They were not meant to imply any particular country or culture or time, but each shot had a faint, just-discernible touch of the macabre and the tragic, and each had the theme of lost children or lost childhoods.

One suggested ragged Victorian match-sellers who froze to death on New Year’s Eve—but there was a faint overlay of a modern-day Centrepoint and the corner of a copy of the
Big Issue
—while another was a rather eerie setting of a lonely Christmas night, with a half-decorated fir tree and gaily-wrapped presents that would wait in vain for children to open them. A third showed shoes that forced their wearer to dance through frozen landscapes and ice-rimed forests into exhaustion, and whether the shoes were ordinary red shoes, or whether they were red from the blood of their wearer was left to the imagination of the viewer. But the shoes were not classical ballet shoes as in the Andersen tale, they were modern trainers, plastered with designer labels.

It was a series of images that had startled Simone’s course tutor who said they were brilliant but dreadfully
dark
, but it had been the series that had won her the coveted Fox Talbot Award, and brought her to the notice of Angelica Thorne who was surprisingly sharp and businesslike beneath the froth and frivolity, and who was just entering her patron-of-the-arts incarnation.

And so, barely a year out of university, Simone had come to the Bloomsbury house with its oddly comforting atmosphere and its feeling that there were stored-away memories, and that those memories might be nearer to the surface than you realized… And that if you could only open the right door or turn a key at the right moment you would unlock those memories and those echoes and see them all come tumbling out around you.

But the memories must be kept in place, both in this house and everywhere else. The past must not intrude: it did not matter and it must not be allowed to matter.

Simone pushed the memories and the echoes firmly away and got up from her desk. Angelica had long since departed for her date with Harry Fitzglen, and the coffee had finished filtering ages ago. She poured herself a mugful and stood at the little window for a moment, looking down into the street. It was dark now, and it was raining as well; she could see the long snaking bead-necklaces of car headlights that were London’s perpetual rush hour.

She liked being on her own in this house, and she liked the feeling of expectancy that occasionally seemed to pass through the rooms as night fell, almost as if the house was anticipating the evening ahead in the way it might have done years ago when it had been an ordinary private house, and people had come here. What kind of people had they been? Would it be possible to find out? She remembered that Harry had said he would try to disinter some of the house’s history, although it was always likely that he would become so entangled with Angelica that he would completely forget about it.

She went back to her desk, and switched on the small CD player, scanning the little stock of CDs she kept here. When she was working she liked playing music to match the current project. Prokofiev might fit the mood tonight, or maybe Mahler—yes, Mahler would be good. She was quite keen on his music; she had seen the Visconti
Death in Venice
film during her final year at the Slade, and had loved the music as much as the film and had gone on from there. She thought she would play the Sixth tonight; it had that terrific second movement in which you could hear the rhythmic machinery of the factories and the furnace-lit foundries of the late nineteenth century, so that you conjured up images of the machines themselves, unstoppable and soulless and altogether Salvador-Dali-nightmarish.

This all fitted brilliantly with Simone’s ideas for Thorne’s second exhibition. She was going to link the past and the present again because that was very much her thing and she wanted it to become a real trademark. One day people might look at her work and say at once, ‘That’s a Simone Marriot, isn’t it?’

But this time she wanted to concentrate on people rather than places. Shadowy, sepia-and-grey images of nineteenth-century factory- or mill-workers, overlaid with transparencies of the newest computer-technology and keyboard operators at huge call centres. Yes.

Mahler’s gorgeous cadences were pouring into the room, and with them came the images Simone was seeking: the rearing, almost-human-looking machines from the industrial revolutions, and the whirring cotton mills and the clanking foundries and the machinery resembling robotic dragons breathing steel-tainted fire-breath… There was a dark and savage poetry about these images; if only she could pin them down…

Concentrate. Reach down into your mind for the pictures. Diligent spinners and calloused-palmed labourers… Mechanic slaves with greasy aprons and hammers, and sweating bodies, fire-washed amid the dust and the clangour, treading their sordid round… And the sempstresses who had toiled for pittances—‘In poverty, hunger and dirt/Sewing at once with a double thread/A shroud as well as a shirt…’ Where did I learn that one? It’s horridly evocative, though. Sempstresses sewing shrouds… Could I incorporate that image somewhere…?

The dark rhythms of Mahler’s music wound onwards and Simone became absorbed, seeing images take shape, hearing the relentless hammers and anvils inside the music, hearing the pounding of iron and steel. How far could you take this idea? Could you have the occasional glimpse of an Armani label against a mob-capped mill-worker? Or an old Arkwright loom that blurred at the edges into a printed circuit board from a computer? Yes, why not? Go for it, kid. Where can I get a shot of an Arkwright loom? Ironbridge? Yorkshire? She broke off to scribble a reminder to write to the various tourist centres.

Delight was gripping her, because she was getting exactly what she wanted—she was conjuring the images up… Thin, workworn fingers tapping out lengths of cloth… Thin, manicured fingers tapping out numbers at call centres—the telecom companies might help there, they might have old publicity stills of switchboards from the forties as well… Might there be a copyright problem with that…?

And then there were the Jarrow Marches, and the General Strike of 1926. Would it work to set sepia shots of those against the Aldermaston Protest Marches? Was there enough relevance between the two, though? What about the miners’ strikes from the seventies in Edward Heath’s government? Yes, that might be better.

The symphony came to an end and silence closed down. Simone leaned back in her chair, massaging her aching neck, slightly light-headed from the music and the deep concentration. She got up to refill her coffee mug, and she was just switching the filter machine off when she heard something that made her turn her head towards the half-open door that led out to the stair. Someone down there? It had sounded almost as if someone had very quietly opened the inner door that led out of the gallery. She stayed absolutely motionless and after a moment the floorboards creaked softly, exactly as if someone was walking very stealthily and very slowly across the floor directly below.

Was there someone prowling around in the house? Someone who had sneaked inside under cover of Mahler’s sweeping music? She waited, listening intently, but there was only the steady pattering of the rain outside, and the faint gurgle as it ran down the drainpipes outside.

Or was it just the rain? Simone set the coffee mug down carefully, trying not to chink it against the desk, and then crossed cautiously to the door. There was a minuscule landing beyond it, and then the stairs which went down to the middle floor, where Simone’s photographs were displayed, and then widened out to descend in more leisurely fashion to the ground floor and the main gallery.

She stood irresolute on the tiny landing. The rain was still running steadily down the windows, casting a rippling waterlight everywhere; Simone could see down into the long silent room quite clearly, and she could see that there was no one there. But on the far window-sill was a big spider-plant; it cast a grotesque, hunched shadow on the walls, and it was moving just very slightly, in the way it always did when someone brushed past it… Or was it only the current of cool air from the windows making it shiver like that?

A churning unease was starting to take hold of Simone and she was remembering that earlier on she had told Angelica to leave the door unlatched for Mrs Whatnot, and of all the mad things to do, to leave a street door unlatched in the middle of London—It would just serve her right if someone had crept in. But there was a buzzer on the door and the music had not been all that loud, and she would surely have heard anyone coming in.

She would certainly have heard Mrs Whatnot who always came in cheerfully and loudly, banging doors, calling out to announce her arrival if there were lights on anywhere, wanting to know if she could make a cup of tea for anyone, exclaiming with uncritical pleasure at anything new that had been put on display since her last stint. Simone waited, hoping to hear the cheerful whirr of the vacuum cleaner start up, or the opening of the broom cupboard under the stairs where the cleaning things were stored, and which Angelica called Little Hell because of its shrieking hinges and black cavernous interior. Nothing. But there had been that soft footfall, she was sure she had not imagined it.

She began to descend the stairs. Nothing moved anywhere, and the middle floor, the floor she always thought of as her own, was shrouded in silent darkness. Simone stood for a moment, scanning the shadows, but everywhere seemed ordinary and unthreatening and exactly as it should be. She went down the last flight, which was wider and easier, and on to the ground floor. Car headlights swept continuously into the showroom, showing it to be empty and innocent, and Simone tried the street door, which was certainly unlatched but which was tidily closed, just as Angelica would have left it. But wouldn’t a prowler or an opportunist burglar have closed it anyway to avert suspicion?

The broom cupboard—Angelica’s Little Hell—was tucked beneath the stairs. It was deep and narrow, but it was more than big enough for someone to hide. Simone considered it. The door was slightly ajar—there was a line of blackness around its rim. A burglar hiding in the broom cupboard?—oh, for goodness’ sake, that’s very nearly farcical! But there was a sudden, horridly vivid, image of clutching hands reaching out from the depths of the mops and buckets and dusters, and of angry staring eyes within the shadows… To dispel this picture she walked briskly across the floor and flung the door open. The hinges protested screechingly as they always did, but there was nothing inside except the cleaning things. You see? You really are imagining all this.

Even so…

She went through to the back of the house, to the tiny lobby behind the main gallery where there was a cupboardsized kitchen, a small loo and washroom, and her own darkroom. But there was no one in the kitchen or the loo, and the darkroom was cool and bland. As far as Simone could tell, nothing had been touched. Imagination after all.

And yet, and yet…

She flipped the latch on the street door, and set the alarm. Mrs Whatnot could easily press the electronic buzzer outside; it would ring in the upstairs office, and Simone could come down to let her in. She went slowly back up the stairs, switching on lights as she went to chase back the shadows. And now the house’s warm friendliness closed around her again. Stupid to have been so abruptly jittery. Here was her own floor, with the familiar framed images lining the walls. The shinily-preserved National Trust manor houses, and the forgotten, boarded-up monstrosities. That old grainmill she had found in a Suffolk village, and the remnant of a beautiful medieval keep, crumbling away near to a section of motorway. And Mortmain, glowering sullenly from its corner.