Dark Dance (3 page)

Had she always been afraid these people would one day reach out for her? Why was the idea so dreadful—for it was, it was horrific. Her mother had always maligned them but knew nothing of them. They had been a shadow at the back of her lover, she conveniently blamed them for his desertion. To the child she must have told horror stories now too recessed and entrenched to come forward to the light, embedded like black fossils in Rachaela’s subconscious. For she was afraid of the tribe of the Scarabae.

‘No, Mr Soames. I’m very sorry. I don’t think your clients are being honest, either with you or with me. If they’re relatives of my father’s there’s really no reason for them to be interested in me. I never knew him. I can’t help them. That’s all I have to say.’ Rachaela got up. ‘I hope now that I’ll be left in peace.’

‘I regret you take this view, Miss Day.’

He was pedantic and huffy, he had lost.

Rachaela went out and passed by the secretary who flooded into a terrifying fake smile all teeth and lipstick.

The lift descended.

It was raining in the street.

I must shrug it off now
. But she could not. The leopard, invisible in light as in murk, still followed at her heels.

‘You’re late, Rachaela,’ said Mr Gerard. Three quarters of an hour. It’s too much. I had a rush, ten people, and where were you?’

‘I went to see Lane and Soames.’

‘Any joy?’ cried Mr Gerard.

Rachaela loathed the expression but expected nothing else of him.

‘There’s been a mistake,’ she said. The people are no one to do with me.’

‘What a pity. Hard luck.’

That week Rachaela continued in her usual way, moving between the bookshop and her flat, doing her slight shopping, eating at the little snack bar, going once to the cinema to see a colourful cruel film which bored her. She bought three books, some shampoo, toothpaste, and oranges, and over all the scent of the leopard was borne to her nostrils. It was still there.

She sensed a tightening cord like a string overwound on a guitar.

She could not appreciate the music which she heard. The noises heard from the neighbouring flats irritated her, and one night there was a party which went on until four in the morning, and she lay wakeful and could not read, the words jumping away under her eyes, the centres of sentences missing.

In the shop she had begun to dislike the entry of any customer. She expected the man in the overcoat or even the fool from the solicitors, or even Soames in person. For some reason she did not visualize one of the awful tribe of the Scarabae. No, they carried on their business from afar. That unknown country written so finely and illegibly on the white paper.

I am waiting for something more.

But what? What could happen. She had refused. It was finished.

On Friday morning she found a letter for herself on the dusty table, one of six identical envelopes from the landlord. Opening this letter she learned that the street was to be widened or renovated or turned inside out in some way. That in six months she would have to find alternative accommodation.

She did not think in terms of coincidence, or even now of destiny. She felt a wave of fright. She stood with her pale hands knotted below her pale face. The complications of the situation, rather than her loss, appalled her.

Then she went to work, late, for she had missed the bus, and Mr Gerard drew her back into the musty inner room.

‘Rachaela, I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to let you go.’

She almost laughed at the exquisite counterbalance of her woes.

‘You mustn’t think it’s anything to do with your, well, your rather erratic timekeeping. We’ve rubbed along all right. Trouble is, this place doesn’t pay. I’ve been thinking about it some time. Saw the old accountant yesterday. No other thing I can do.’

He offered her a biscuit by way of consolation and she took it.

She imagined the agent of the leopard coming in to Mr Gerard with a silken knife, threatening him. She thought perhaps agents had set to work on the landlord of the flats.

She bit the biscuit and ate its tastelessness.

‘Stay on the month. I’ll give you an extra month in lieu, anyway. I realize it’s a bit much. You’ve been here a year, haven’t you? I’ll miss you.’

She knew he lied, that secretly he was glad to tread on her spine. All those times he had tried to learn things about her and she had not let him. All the jokes she had not giggled at, the untrue rushes of book-buying customers she had missed by being late. Her lack of apology.

He was well rid of her.

But what was she to do?

She knew what she was supposed to do. It was quite obvious. The leopard sat there, awaiting her, its inky form wrapped in a garment of fog and night.

She picked up a fragile broken book, a dead black moth. Opening its pages she read: ‘Her heart lifted at the prospect of this happy reunion.’ And shivered. It was inevitable, and had been so from the first. She would have to give in.

None of the other tenants communicated with Rachaela about the proposed dissolution of their homes. Perhaps they did not care. Two of the flats changed hands regularly, and even the rock music enthusiast had only been installed a few months. She had previously avoided contact with all of them. But they would probably know themselves as defenceless in the face of bureaucracy as she judged herself to be.

She went into work on time, and did not linger over her lunch hours now. She was scrupulous.

Mr Gerard crowded her at the till. He had come out of hiding to serve the customers, to get used to it. He no longer made his telephone calls, but he ate vast quantities of biscuits. As the week ended and the end of the month drew near, Mr Gerard became embarrassed, making awful little extra jokes and asking Rachaela to sweep up, which generally he had not troubled with before. He did not send her for sandwiches but chewed slabs of bread and pickle.

She did not like his proximity. She was seldom alone now in the shop. She began to long for the month to be over.

She would have to look for another job. It would be best to try one of the agencies. They were smart and brisk. She hated them.

It was raining fiercely and she hurried over the green and almost collided with the overcoated man in the woollen hat.

‘Miss Day. I was asked to put this directly into your hands.’

She took the envelope. It was typed. They stood in the downpour confronting each other, both creatures of the jungle who might ignore the rain.

‘I don’t want this.’

‘You must take it. Read it.’

‘I thought all this had stopped.’

‘Please, Miss Day.’

‘All right. Very well.’

She moved away with the letter, the rain thick on her wonderful hair as broken glass.

In the hall she shook herself with a little grunt of defiance. The closed outer door was a barricade. The demon locked outside.

One of the other tenants came clattering down the stairs. A girl in a red coat. Rachaela considered stopping her, discussing the downfall of their house. But the girl did not look real. So young and contemporary she was hardly on the plane of existence, an egg-shaped face, smooth, not a line or an expression to show she had lived, was alive. Rachaela let her pass on, and opened the door to her flat.

The light was bizarre, greenish and electric from the rain. The walls danced. She longed for the warm round body of the cat, to wake her and press her face to the smoky fur with its inner smell of herbs and being. But the cat was gone, only the ghost, conjured by tired eyes, remained to haunt her, indifferently.

Rachaela took off her coat and hung it up. She pulled off her boots. She sat down on the edge of a chair and slit the letter open with a bronze paper knife resembling a dagger.

It was thick white paper.

The letter was typed, as if they knew she could not read their calligraphy, or would not. No chance of a blindfold. Too short to be avoided.

Dear Miss Smith,

By now you will know that we have traced you and are eager to meet with you. Please give us this opportunity. Your mother knew very little of the family and your father, we understand only too well, abandoned you. Give us this chance to make possible amends. The familial connection is complex and we will not attempt to describe it here, but hope to do so before you, in person, at some future date.

Our name is not, evidently, the one given to our agents, but as you have correctly guessed, ‘Scarabae’. That name to which you yourself are entitled.

As Mr Soames will have told you, any travelling expenses or expenses entailed in tying up your affairs will be borne by us.

We trust that we shall hear from you soon.

The letter was signed boldly ‘Scarabae’. Not even any initial. A dynamic collective which told nothing.

There was no address. The letter was headed solely by the words ‘The House’ and the winter’s date.

Rachaela glanced intuitively towards the unlit electric fire. Her impulse was to burn the letter.

Instead she sat with it in her hands for three quarters of an hour, in the chilly flat, while the rain danced on the windows and the walls, erosively.

‘Yes, I’ve changed my mind.’

‘I really am delighted, Miss Day,’ gushed Soames. ‘I’m sure you’ve made the wise decision.’

When Rachaela had finished this phone call, she called Mr Gerard.

‘I’m sorry, I shan’t be completing the month.’

‘Oh. Well that’s not very fair.’

‘You’ve dismissed me. What difference does it make.’

Mr Gerard began to inform her in detail of the difference, shouting. Rachaela put down the phone. Four days later a cheque arrived. He had not paid her for the extra month nor a penny beyond the day she had last worked for him, which had been Friday. He would have to manage the Saturday rushes of two people on his own now.

She wandered about the tiny flat, tidying it for the last time. If she returned, the flat would be no more. She would store her furniture, the Scarabae could pay for that.

Day by day now the flat became like a prison. She could settle to nothing but packing her two new cases, parceling up the few leftovers for Oxfam. Her plants had died, she could not grow things. The cat had died. She had no friends, no one to bid farewell. She sent the new address to the landlord, who would probably ignore it. The new address was surreal in any case, perhaps invented, a place that did not exist.

A lot of matters she left unseen to. For when she came back.

But it was inconceivable, a return, the outward journey with all its twists and pitfalls before her.

Outside on the green she thought that, twice, she caught sight of the agent in the woollen hat, hiding among the wet trees, watching. But he might be an hallucination.

She hoped the ghost of the cat would vanish from her rooms once she had left. The thought made her cry as sometimes she did, violently, but never for very long.

She had indulged in purely emotionally-sexual fantasies from childhood, at rest or in bed before going to sleep. She pictured unformed adventure, and men almost faceless, tall and black-haired. In the world she never met them, although now and then, for a moment at some street corner, across a room, she might see a fleeting illusion which dissolved as she gazed on it.

Following her mother’s death—when Rachaela was twenty-five—she had believed herself too old for these dreams, hazy and incoherent, repetitive and unlikely as they were, meetings in storm and mist, on hillsides, under midnight trees... She put them away. Now and then a book or a film might try to trigger them. She was stem.

Currently her imaginary excursions were all to the place where she was going. She conjured it with terror. It was like a swamp which sucked her in.

After the last of the journey, many hours long, the traveller was hypnotized, her body still moving with the sway and judder of the train, her eyes amazed by stillness. She stood outside the tiny, half-derelict station among the winter weeds. The sky swept to the land. It was a scene by Turner, great clouds, and suggestions of hills; no break of sun in the vanquished afternoon.

Then along the asphalt road that ran above the station, a fawn Cortina drove towards her.

Isolated in the landscape, she and the car seemed destined for one another.

The Cortina swung into the station forecourt among the weeds and grass. The window went down.

‘Name of Smith?’

The driver had an indeterminate alien accent.

‘Yes.’

The door opened and politely the driver came to lift her two bags into the boot. Heavy with books, not clothes, he must strain. He said, ‘Come for a holiday?’

‘No,’ Rachaela said, coldly, to exclude him.

Not a driver of the city, he did not impertinently press her, presuming on a wish to talk. He fell silent, opening the passenger door.

Rachaela got in. As the car started up she felt relief. Her body had been in motion so long it now seemed only comfortable if moving.

The car was stuffy and dank yet she sank back against the seat, longing to close her eyes. But the alien driver meant she could not abandon herself. She watched the pale olive green of the country stream away along the road. Dark woodland patched it and occasionally the tobacco-coloured basins of fields, a stone farmhouse, an ancient garage with fallen sign and brilliant rust.