A Dark Dividing (35 page)

But although she had been frightened half to death as the jolting cart rattled its way through the night, a tiny greenshoot of hope had uncurled within her mind. This was bad and it was probably going to become even worse, but at least she was out of the despairing misery of the workhouse. Supposing, just supposing, that whatever lay ahead might be something good? She was still clutching this hope when the cart finally rumbled over uneven cobblestones into a hustling, crowded place filled with shouting, raucous people and mean, narrow streets.

The men who had taken Tansy appeared to be part of the twilight half-world of Victorian brothels, and fairgrounds and freak shows. Tansy had not really understood about that, at least not at the start, but Tansy’s creator had understood it very well indeed. The people who owned and ran these child-brothels and these freak shows were a dark and damning stigma on the age, said Floy, and Harry, fathoms deep in Floy’s long-ago world, could feel the passion and the bitter anger behind these words. The conviction that Tansy had not been wholly fictional took a firmer hold of him. Floy’s sister? His daughter?

The street where Tansy was taken was called Bolt Place, and the house into which she was carried was a thin, squint-faced building, squeezed in between two other similar houses. And despite her determination to see this as an adventure, the first night had been more dreadful than anything she had imagined.

The men took her to a small, sparsely furnished room at the top of three flights of stairs, and gave her a clean shift to put on, bread and cheese to eat and a mug of water to drink. There was a bed in the room, with a pillow and some blankets, and a marble-topped washstand with a chipped ewer containing water. The only splash of colour was a rag rug at one side of the bed, and a small glass jar on the window ledge that someone had filled with meadow flowers—tiny, sweet-faced violets and heart-shaped wood sorrel.

A woman with a hard, grasping face said Tansy was to have a visitor tonight. She must be very kind to the visitor, otherwise she would have to be punished.

The visitor was a man; Tansy had known it would be, of course, and she had known, more or less, what to expect. She had secretly hoped the man might be good-looking and kind, but he had had glittery eyes, like dead fish, and hands with rough nails that snagged her hair and her skin. He had got into the bed with her, and said he hoped she knew what he had paid for. The ugliness and the pain of that night had printed itself indelibly on Tansy’s mind for ever, but she had got through it—and through the other nights that followed—by fixing her eyes on the little jar of wild-flowers, and trying to think only about the velvet mistiness of the violets, and the delicate, purple-veined whiteness of the wood sorrel.

Oh God, thought Harry, briefly coming up out of the world Floy had created, you hated not being able to write that scene properly, didn’t you, Philip! You took it as far as you could with that stuff about hands and rough fingernails scraping Tansy’s skin, but I’ll bet you swore at the censorship laws and cursed the Lord Chancellor because you couldn’t properly describe what was done to that poor waiflike creature! An image of Floy, seated in the upstairs room of the Bloomsbury house that was now Thorne’s Gallery, thrusting his fingers through his hair in exasperation, rose up vividly before Harry’s mind. And yet despite the restrictions, Floy, writing in the early years of the twentieth century, had still managed to paint word-pictures of the seedy house to which Tansy had been taken—he had even put in that glancing reference to violets and wood sorrel—and he had conveyed the pain and fear of Tansy and the other girls, and Tansy’s perpetual guilt, which came up from the printed pages like a gust of tainted breath.

The pain and the guilt had stayed with Tansy for a long, long time.

Roz had expected to feel guilty after that night with Joe Anderson, but she had not felt guilty in the least. That would be because he loved her, of course.

She had not been expecting him to leave Melissa and the twins for her (well, not right away), but she had looked forward to the romance and the intrigue that would surely go with being the girlfriend of an MP. Discreet weekends in country hotels; quiet dinners at her house. Even secret journeys in cars with blacked-out windows, with a trusted driver who knew the truth whisking her through the night to be with her lover. It was not overly fanciful to remember Cleopatra smuggled in to Mark Antony rolled inside a carpet in that context. Roz had seen films about that.

But then she had gone out to his house and seen him drive off into the night to bring his wife home; she had heard him tell his neighbour that he had missed Mel, and that had been when she understood that Joe had been making use of her. When she got home, Roz had sat shivering in the familiar sitting-room, the photographs of her aunt and of her parents watching from their frames on the mantelpiece. She thought about Joe and how she had risked her job and her career to find Mel for him, and that made her cry so hard she was sick a second time. Disgusting! Humiliating! And all because of Joe Anderson, the heartless cruel two-faced liar!

Roz’s aunt would have been coldly disapproving of such lack of control: she would have called it making an exhibition of yourself over a man, and she would have asked if Roz had no more pride than to sit crying and shivering like this over a man who did not want her? And what of the man’s poor wife, she would have said.

Roz had never forgotten her first sight of the woman who was in fact her father’s aunt—therefore her own great-aunt. It had been just after her sixth birthday, and she had been taken to the tall thin house, its rooms made dark by the thick shrubbery outside. Her aunt had been seated in a wooden high-backed chair in the room she said was the parlour, and she had studied Roz in silence for what had felt like a long time. Then she had said that this was where Rosamund would live now that her parents were dead, and had asked if she was a good child and loved Jesus.

Roz had not known how to answer this, and she had not known how to cope with being called Rosamund either. She was terrified of her great-aunt, and she was terrified of her aunt’s house which was shadowy and unfriendly after her parents’ bright modern home. The rooms were full of little whispery draughts that wriggled under the doors and through the ill-fitting windows and made the curtains move, so that if you were in a room by yourself you thought someone was standing behind them.

Every evening at seven o’clock (eight o’clock on Sundays because of evening service), Roz had to go up the unlit stairs to her bedroom by herself, and every evening she heard the stairs behind her creak slightly and knew it was the devil creeping along after her, ready to snatch her up and carry her down to hell. Her aunt said you had to be forever watchful for the devil, who was everywhere in the world. He had cloven hooves which he used to smite sinners. ‘I was a sinner,’ said Roz’s aunt. ‘I was a very great sinner, Rosamund, until God put out His arms and brought me home again.’

When Roz was small she had not understood any of this. What she had understood, and what had remained strongly with her, had been the sound of the devil’s footsteps slyly creaking on the stairs behind her when she went up to bed. Every night she scurried up the stairs in order to outrace the devil, and bolted into her bedroom and dived under the covers where she was safe on account of the picture of Jesus hanging over the bed. The devil could not bear Jesus, in fact the very sound of Jesus’s name made the devil throw up; Roz knew this. Every night she said a prayer to Jesus as she went up the stairs. Her aunt said this was a very good thing to do; prayer was the way to repel the devil.

She said other things to Roz over the years, and the more Roz grew up, the more her aunt talked to her. She told Roz how she had been cheated of her own childhood; an ordinary, carefree childhood was a thing that most people took for granted, she said, but some children had it stolen from them. Some children, by no fault of their own, had to live in dreadful places, under the care of cruel and evil people, and they had to lead lives filled with poverty and ugliness. Sometimes they fell into sin because of those lives; it was not always their fault if they did so, although there was never any excuse for sinning, Roz must remember that. In any case, sinning brought its own heartaches.

Sinning brought its own heartaches… Or did it?

M
EL HAD FOUND the big house unexpectedly unfriendly since Joe’s death.

She had never liked the place very much—it was too new and too characterless—but she had never before found it unsettling. Now it seemed to be full of inexplicable sounds—the creaking of a door, the sound of a soft footfall on the gravel path under the kitchen window—and along with all of this was a feeling of being watched. This was patently ridiculous, and it was almost certainly a reaction to Joe’s death. There were dozens of stories of newly bereaved people hearing their dead husband or wife returning from an ordinary day at the office, and feeling they were not alone in the house. With a husband you had loved and whom you were missing desperately, such sounds and feelings might be vaguely comforting. But Mel had not loved Joe for several years, and although his death had been appalling and shocking, she was not missing him at all.

She finally acknowledged that the feelings and the occasional sounds were starting to spook her, and she even went as far as having her hearing checked at her local GP’s surgery, and booking an eye test with the optician. Everything was absolutely normal of course. Whatever the sounds were, they were certainly not Joe’s ghost, returning to haunt her!

But one night, closing the curtains in the downstairs room that had been Joe’s study and that Mel had hardly entered since his death, she caught a darting movement in the garden near to the gate, and then a woman’s outline—ordinary, unremarkable, wearing a plain dark raincoat—walked quickly down the street. It was definitely not a trick of her own imagination, but it was nothing to fuss over; it was most probably a stranger to the area trying to find a particular house, or someone delivering leaflets. Still, she might see about having one of those security alarm systems installed; if she sold the house and moved somewhere smaller, which was what she wanted to do, it would make a good selling point anyway.

It was a small and pleasant diversion to have Roz Raffan to lunch a few days after Mel glimpsed the raincoated woman. She thought Roz looked thinner and rather pale, but she seemed pleased to see Mel and the twins and to have been asked to lunch. There was a thin December mist outside but the house was warm and bright, and Mel had made a big pot of homemade soup with delicious French bread, and cheese and fruit to follow. They could have a couple of glasses of wine as well, since Roz did not drive. The twins’ pram was in the big bay window which was where they liked to be because they could watch what was going on outside. They were still twined in that pitiable embrace, but Simone was delightedly following the progress of birds in the tree outside the window. It was still almost impossible to tell them apart until you remembered that Simone was the one with her right hand free, Sonia the one with her left…

Mel and Roz talked about Castallack and Joe, of course; about how completely bizarre his death had been. Roz asked how Mel was coping, and Mel said, ‘I keep replaying what happened that morning—only in the replay, I find a way to rescue him.’

Roz said this was a very frequent reaction to something traumatic. Car crashes and house-fires, things like that. People said, If only I had turned left instead of right, or, Oh, why did I leave the chip-pan on the heat.

‘The thing I haven’t been able to work out,’ said Mel, ‘is how Joe found me.’ And then, because it no longer seemed to matter about keeping the mechanics of her flight to Castallack a secret, she said, ‘I’d been so very careful. I wanted it to be a clean break for everyone’s sake, and I thought I had covered my tracks so well.’

There was a sudden silence, and Mel looked up, because there had surely been an odd reaction from Roz. Then Roz said, very slowly, ‘But Joe didn’t find you, Melissa. I found you for him.’