Dark Dance (2 page)

But Rachaela went about the bewildering process of clearing up her mother’s death without tears. At the cemetery when the joyous young clergyman had promised remembrance of the ‘dear old lad/—who had liked to think of herself, when alive, no more than middle-aged—Rachaela had known a terrible ache in all her muscles, not the least the muscle of her heart. It was her body relaxing for the first time in fifteen years. She was free.

She never ceased to be thankful for her freedom. Her aloneness was her pleasure. She missed her cat, who had given her an uncloying and nearly careless love, her cat who never raged or shouted, never told her things, never demanded. But her mother had been a weight of iron. Rachaela had stayed light as air.

Until now.

Because now it was as if her mother reached out for her again. The doom-laden asides of family history, the portion of the unknown father who had revealed just enough before deserting to leave a lifelong stigma of the cheat or the fraud.

His family, not
Simon,
but having a name Rachaela could hardly forget, its oddness lost in repetition, ‘Scarabae’—
Scarraby
it was pronounced. A weird name to go with a weird fly-by-night man. ‘I loved him, the swine, the sod,’ had said Rachaela’s mother. She had not taken his name. Her own name was Smith, so foolish that Rachaela, left alone, discarded it.

Rachaela put on the radio, the third station, and heard Shostakovich in an unmistakable clash of silver chords.

She sat by the fire and edged off her boots.

In half an hour she would make her supper, toast and cheese. Tomorrow was Friday and she would fetch a salad and some cold meat from the deli. Perhaps a glass of wine.

Outside the silence of the fog waited.

She had screwed up the letter from Lane and Soames and thrown it in the waste bin at the shop.

Perhaps she had come into some money.

Would she want it if it depended on her father’s infamous side?

‘He’s dead by now. Have to be, the way he carried on,’ her mother said loudly in Rachaela’s mind.

Four years since the funeral.

‘You never came through, did you?’ the young man said, accusatory.

She had been trying to avoid him by dusting the stacks, taking out old books that were slightly foxed, and brushing them gently.

‘Is it any of your business?’

The young man became flustered. People relied on you not to be rude to them while they tried closer and closer forms of insolence. Rachaela did not play this game.

‘No—well, yes. I delivered the letter. Now old Soames thinks I pissed about and never gave it you.’

‘But you did.’

‘Yes, I bloody well did. Why didn’t you go?’

‘Excuse me,’ said Rachaela, and slipped away around the shelves.

‘What’s all this now?’ inquired Mr Gerard, who had come from the back eating biscuits. ‘Something wrong?’

‘Er no, this young lady—I brought her over a letter from Lane and Soames and she hasn’t taken it up, and old Soames thinks I’m to blame.’

‘What letter’s this?’

Rachaela did not answer. She dusted a copy of
The Egyptian
and put it carefully back into its slot.

‘Something to do with property,’ said the young man. ‘That’s my guess anyway. They’re all of a doodah over it, damn nuisance.’

The fog was in the shop again. Unrelentingly it mouthed the capital.

‘She doesn’t have to make an appointment. Just pop up and Soames’ll see her. Wouldn’t take a minute—’

‘You could go in your lunch hour, Rachaela. My God, don’t you think you should? It might be worthwhile.’

Rachaela did not speak.

She did not tell Mr Gerard to mind his own business since she had never been rude to him. He paid her small wages.

The young man sighed. ‘I’ll just take the biography, then. Waste of time, reading fiction.’

‘Luckily not everyone thinks so,’ said Mr Gerard with dislike. Suddenly unpopular, the young man hastened from the shop.

‘What the hell are you doing, Rachaela?’

‘I’m dusting.’

‘You
never dust. Stop it. There’s clouds of muck going up. Go to lunch. Take an extra ten minutes. Go and see this Soames.’

It was Saturday morning and the animal of the crowd was out shopping. Its mood was the familiar one, surly and desperate.

Rachaela walked towards the snack bar. A man charging by slammed into her shoulder and almost spun her round. She found the man from out of the fog by her shoulder.

‘Miss Day, you will allow me to accompany you.’

He took her elbow and turned her all the way about. They moved against the crowd, which seethed and spat in their faces.

‘You’re forcing me to go there?’

‘No, no, Miss Day. You will be pleased. Come along.’

It was Saturday. Would Soames be in his office? Apparently he was.

Three youths in football colours of some team from Mars collided with them. They were no longer a unit, the foreign man and Rachaela. They were hammered apart.

Rachaela whirled into the fog, into the thick of the crowd, giving herself to its hasty rhythm.

The man did not call out after her. His hand did not clutch and grasp her arm.

She made towards the museum, where she spent her lunch hour among the blue and pink stone of god birds and smiling pharoahs, eventually eating two bananas bought from a stall as she walked to the shop, fog-bananas.

The man did not come into the shop, and the young one did not come back.

Mr Gerard said, ‘Did you?’

‘No.’

‘Silly. Silly, silly girl. Make us some tea.’

She stood on the bus home. The vehicle was full of excited escapees.

The shop shut half an hour earlier on Saturday in order to allow Mr Gerard, also, and his employee the chance to rush away to a bacchanal. But she doubted he had one any more than she did. Mr Gerard remained as thankful a mystery to her as she remained a provoking mystery to him. He lived with a wife near Kennington. She could only visualize a Mrs Gerard who was a female version of Mr, in a Fair Isle woolly or sweaty dress and cardigan, eating custard creams or reading pieces out of papers over the telephone.

The fog hung on the green as intensely as ever, but Rachaela did not anticipate the man. She did not know what she looked for. Something unpleasant.

In the flat as she drank a glass of wine, the other half of Friday’s bottle, the door sounded.

No one called on Rachaela.

She thought of some sort of emergency. Perhaps an accident had happened in the street. She might not have heard a squealing of brakes over the storm of Beethoven, not to mention the rock music from the flat below.

‘Hallo?’

‘Miss Day?’

She did not recognize the voice, isolated and tinny in the receiver.

‘What do you want?’

‘Miss Day, this is Mr Soames of Lane and Soames. I wonder
if
you would be good enough to let me in.’

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘But Miss Day, I’ve come out of my way to see you on this very urgent matter. It is an urgent matter, Miss Day—’

‘No, Mr Soames, I’m not interested.’

‘My client, Mr Simon, has authorized—’

‘Good-bye, Mr Soames.’

The door sounded three more times after she had replaced the entry-phone.

Rachaela paced her tiny room. Upstairs a tinier bedchamber, and a cupboard converted to a bathroom—this minuscule, expensive flat that mostly her mother’s savings had enabled her to choose, and when they were gone, what?

Perhaps it was money Mr Soames offered.

Money was remote to Rachaela. She partly feared it, it carried responsibilities, it caused such trouble and damage. But then.

The phone no longer made noises.

Mr Soames had gone away.

On Sunday she had a long bath, in the afternoon, with a radio play on.

She shaved her legs, as she did every third day, and the slender under-pits of her arms. She washed her hair, as every third day she washed it, and left it to dry in the artificial Africa of two electric bars. These habits were her own. As a child, her mother had washed her hair every fortnight.

Outside a fine drizzle penetrated the yellow fog.

She had a lamb chop for dinner and thought as she ate it of the beautiful white curled creature it had been. This did not sicken her, only made her sorrowful. She enjoyed the meat of the lamb even in some way more because she liked what it had been and pitied it.

She had once in her teens tried to become a vegetarian, but she had vomited and bent double with terrible pains in her stomach for weeks. She gave it up.

Her mother had mocked both her attempt and its failure. She had dragged Rachaela to a dish of burnt fish fingers. ‘Stop all this bloody nonsense.’

Her mother had had to bring her up alone.

She was thinking of her mother too much.

It did not hurt, but it unsettled her.

She had never said goodbye to her mother, that was the difficulty, perhaps. The freedom had only been spontaneous. Perhaps she should have kissed the embalmed corpse farewell, on the brow, as in one of the more sensitive old-fashioned horror films. The embalming had not looked like her mother. Something had gone wrong and they had pushed her mother’s rather large stomach up into the chest so that she appeared stout and matronly in a way that, in life, she never had. The rouge on her cheeks was patchy. Not dead but sleeping—no: decidedly dead.

She missed the cat, which had been used to sitting on the edge of Rachaela’s bath, sometimes pawing the water in surprise. Or on the table, decorous, begging for nothing.

Perhaps she should find a more lucrative job. Where? Who would take her on? She had no experience. She was twenty-nine. Should she work in a wine bar now? She thought of the noise and the hustling, the broken glasses and drunks. No, the bookshop was safe. It had paid for the chop.

Rachaela sighed.

Beyond the curtains the fog was giving way. She could see across the green to a gaudy Sunday bus moving sluggishly westward.

On Monday morning Rachaela walked down a clear grey Lizard Street and up to the black lions. She entered the building and went to the reception desk. Three minutes later she was in the efficient lift which tore her up into the building’s cranium.

Without the fog, it was possible to see, from a window, the bookshop cowering under its dirty roof five storeys down. It was dwarfed.

Mr Soames’s secretary greeted her brightly and took her at once into the office, like a valued client.

It was a sombre glassy room, whose window looked towards the park. On the trees there was one last faint wraith of lingering fog. The screen was gone. The hunter out in the open.

‘‘I’m here,’ said Rachaela.

‘Yes indeed. Let me say how glad I am that you reconsidered.’

‘It got rather frantic, didn’t it? Your call. That little man in the overcoat and wool hat.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t know who that can be,’ said Mr Soames smoothly. He had never had eyes, only glasses. All his face had succumbed to them. ‘Won’t you sit?’

Rachaela sat in the leather chair. It did not please her to think it had once been a black bull rushing over tindered meadows. Maybe it was only a clever plastic.

She sat with her hands together, her legs crossed. Her heart beat uncomfortably, but Mr Soames seemed more nervous than she.

‘Miss Day—first of all, I believe that your name was, until a short while ago, something other. Am I correct?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘I don’t like to stress this, but my clients, the Simons, made rather a point of it. Your mother—a Miss Smith. And your father—well, these things happen.’

Rachaela waited.

Mr Soames twitched at his cack-handedness.

‘The Simons are a connection of your father’s family. Cousins, I believe.’

Rachaela waited. Her mother had never mentioned cousins, only the Scarabae family, obscure and artistic, darkly ominous, somewhere out of the city, inaccessible, wielding a whip of intent. ‘He never stayed with me because they would keep on and on at him.’ But of course he had never stayed with her because she had conceived Rachaela. Strange she had never flung that in Rachaela’s face. It would have been like her.

‘—And even after all this time, hope that you will be willing to visit them.’

She had not been attending.

‘Visit them? These Simons?’

‘Yes, just so. I have to tell you, Miss Day, a moneyed family.’

‘Is the name Simon?’

‘Yes, Miss Day.’

‘Then I don’t understand what they have to do with me.’

‘Perhaps you should agree to see them. Then you’ll discover. As I say, they’re prepared to pay your travelling expenses.’

She had not listened, and so did not know to where she was intended to travel.

‘I find all this very peculiar. I find it suspicious.’

Mr Soames was ringing for a file.

‘I shall show you the correspondence, Miss Day.’

She did not want to see it. She felt no curiosity. She felt threatened.

Their name was not Simon, and God knew where they lived or why they wanted to find her but it made no sense, this coincidence of the solicitors being so adjacent. Unless surely
they
had tracked her down previously, and then placed their business with the firm of Lane and Soames to give it a spurious orderliness and a handy quality. Easy to nab her when she was only next door—it had been perfect for them. And that other one was their agent.

The file came with the glowing cerise-clawed secretary. She teetered in and out as if high on something.

‘The name,’ Rachaela said again. ‘Is it actually Scarabae?’

Soames did not twitch or flinch. He was impervious, a little irked.

‘The name I have is Simon, Miss Day.’

He opened the file before her and indicated a lengthy correspondence, lots of long sheets with neat dates and slightly faulty typing, and handwritten letters on featureless white paper. Rachaela could not read handwriting of any kind. Probably its intimacy repelled her. She glanced at the indecipherable address on the handwritten sheets and raised her brows, trying to convey to Soames an air of sensible concentration. She was not responding as he wanted. She felt cornered. The leopard was prowling round the room.