The Four Last Things (26 page)

To make matters worse, he wasn’t sure what Angel was really doing down there. The soundproofing made eavesdropping impossible. After a while, Eddie unlocked the back door and went into the garden.

It was much colder today. The damp, raw air hurt his throat. He could not be bothered to fetch a coat. He walked warily down to the long, double-glazed window of the basement. As he had feared, the curtains were drawn. The disappointment brought tears into his eyes. His skin was burning hot. He leant his forehead against the cool glass.

The movement brought his head closer to the side of the window. There was a half-inch gap between the frame and the side of the curtains.

Scarcely daring to breathe, he knelt down on the concrete path and peered through the gap. At first he saw nothing but carpet and bare, white wall. He shifted his position. Part of the Victorian armchair slid into his range of vision. Lucy was sitting there. All he could see was her feet and ankles, Mickey Mouse slippers and pale-green tights, projecting from the seat. She was not moving. He wondered if she were sleeping. She had seemed very tired in the bath, perhaps because of the medication.

At that moment Angel came into view, still wearing her white robe. Round her neck was a long, purple scarf, like a broad, shiny ribbon with tassels on the end. Her eyes were closed and her lips were moving. As Eddie watched, she raised her arms towards the ceiling. Eddie licked dry lips. What he could see through the gap, the cross section of the basement, seemed only marginally connected with reality; it belonged in a dream.

Angel moved out of sight. Eddie panicked. She might have seen him at the window. In a moment the back door would open and she would catch him peeping.
I just came out for a breath of fresh air.
He straightened up quickly and glanced around. There was enough wind to stir the trees at the bottom of the garden and in Carver’s beyond. The leafless branches made a black tracery, through which he glimpsed Mrs Reynolds on her balcony. Eddie shivered as he walked back to the house.

Mrs Reynolds watches me, I watch Angel: who watches Mrs Reynolds? Must be God.

Eddie giggled, imagining God following Mrs Reynolds’s movements through a pair of field glasses from some vantage point in the sky. According to Mr Reynolds, his wife had become a born-again Christian since Jenny Wren had sent herself into a coma.

‘It’s a comfort to her,’ Mr Reynolds had said. ‘Not really my cup of tea, but never mind.’

Eddie opened the back door and went inside. The warmth of the kitchen enveloped him but he could not stop shivering. He went into the hall. The basement door was still closed. He pressed his ear against one of the panels. All he heard was his own breathing, which seemed unnaturally loud.

Clinging to the banister, he climbed the stairs and rummaged in the bathroom cupboard until he found the thermometer. He perched uncomfortably on the side of the bath while he took his temperature.
It’s not fair. Why won’t she let me in the basement too?
He took the thermometer out of his mouth. His temperature was over 102 degrees. He felt strangely proud of this achievement: he must be really ill. He deserved special treatment.

He found some paracetamol in the cupboard, took two tablets out of the bottle and snapped them in half. He poured water into a green plastic beaker which he had had since he was a child. The flowing water so fascinated him that he let it flood over the rim of the beaker and trickle over his fingers. At last he swallowed the tablets and went into his bedroom to lie down.

Alternately hot and cold, he lay fully clothed under the duvet. He thought how nice it would be if Angel and Lucy brought him a hot-water bottle and a cooling drink. They could sit with him for a while, and perhaps Angel would read a story.
Nobody cares about me.
He stared at the picture of the little girl which his father had given his mother all those years ago.
Very nice, Stanley. If you like that sort of thing.
A little later he heard his parents talking: dead voices from the big front bedroom; perhaps they were not really dead after all – perhaps they were watching him now.

Eddie drifted in and out of sleep. Just before three in the afternoon he woke to find his mouth dry and his body wet with sweat. He dragged himself out of bed and stood swaying and shivering in the bedroom.
I need some tea, a nice cup of tea.

He found his glasses and went slowly downstairs. To his surprise, he heard voices in the kitchen. He pushed open the door. Lucy was sitting at the table eating a boiled egg. Angel was now dressed in jeans and jersey; her hair was tied back in a ponytail. As Eddie staggered into the room, he heard Lucy saying, ‘Mummy always cuts my toast into soldiers, but Daddy doesn’t bother.’

She stopped talking as soon as she saw Eddie. Angel and Lucy stared at Eddie.
Two’s company, three’s none.

‘What are you doing in the kitchen?’ Eddie said, his voice rising in pitch. ‘It’s against the rules.’

‘The rules aren’t written in stone. Circumstances alter cases.’ Angel stroked Lucy’s dark head. ‘And this is a very special little circumstance.’

‘But they never come in the kitchen.’

‘That’s enough, Eddie. How are you feeling?’

Thrown off balance, he stared at her.

‘Cat got your tongue?’

‘How did you know I’m ill?’

‘You should try looking at yourself in the mirror,’ Angel said, not unkindly.

‘I think it’s flu.’

‘I doubt it: probably just a virus. You need paracetamol and lots of fluids.’

Eddie sat down at the table. Lucy looked at him, her spoon halfway to her mouth, and to his delight she smiled.

‘Finish your egg, dear,’ Angel said. ‘It’s getting cold.’

‘I don’t want any more.’

‘Nonsense. You need some food in that little tummy. And don’t forget your Ribena.’

Lucy dropped her spoon on the table. ‘But I’ve had enough.’

‘Come along: eat up.’

‘I’m full.’

‘You’ll do as I say, Lucy. You must always finish what’s on your plate.’

‘Mummy doesn’t make me when I’m full.’ Lucy’s eyes brimmed with tears but her voice was loud so she sounded more angry than afraid. ‘I want Mummy.’

‘We’re not at home to Miss Crosspatch,’ Angel announced.

Eddie laughed. He would not usually have dared to laugh, but now the boundaries were shifting. After all, he was not entirely sure that this was really happening. It might be a dream. At any moment he might wake up and see, hanging on the wall by the door, the picture of the little girl which his father had given his mother. The girl like Lucy.

‘You’re really not yourself, Eddie.’ Angel walked into the hall. ‘I’m going to take your temperature.’ Her footsteps ran lightly up the stairs.

Lucy pushed the toast aside with a violent movement of her right arm. The far side of the plate caught the plastic cup, which slid to the edge of the table. Ribena flooded across the floor.

For an instant, Eddie and Lucy looked at each other. Then Lucy slithered off her seat and ran for the door – not the door to the hall but the door to the garden. Eddie knew he should do something, if this were not a dream, but he wasn’t sure he would be able to stand up. In any case, it wouldn’t matter: they kept the back door locked when they had a little girl staying with them.

He watched Lucy twisting the handle and pulling. He watched the door opening and felt cold air against his skin. Only then, as Lucy ran into the garden, did he realize that she really was outside. He was aware, too, that this was his fault – that he had unlocked the door when he went out to look through the basement window at Angel and Lucy. Seeing Mrs Reynolds on her balcony had made him forget to relock it when he came in. Angel would blame him, which was unfair: it was Mrs Reynolds’s fault. He stood up, propping himself on the table.

Angel took him by surprise. She ran across the kitchen from the hall, the ponytail bouncing behind her, and out of the back door. Eddie heard a crack like an exploding firework. There was another crack, then a pregnant silence, the peace before the storm. He let himself sink back on to his chair.

It was almost a relief when Lucy began to cry: jagged sobs, not far from hysteria. Angel dragged her inside, kicked the door shut and turned the key in the lock. Angel was pale and tight-lipped.

‘Very well, madam.’ Angel was holding Lucy by the ear, her nails biting in to the pink skin. ‘Do you know what happens to naughty children? They go to hell.’

Eddie cleared his throat. ‘In a way, it’s not her fault. She’s –’

‘Of course it’s her fault.’

Lucy pressed her hand against her left cheek. The sobbing mutated into a thin, high wail.

‘Perhaps she’s tired,’ Eddie muttered. ‘Perhaps she needs a rest.’

Angel pushed Lucy away. The girl fell against a chair and slid to the floor. She stayed there, half-sitting, half-sprawling, with an arm hooked round a chair leg and her head resting against the side of the seat. Ribena soaked into the skirt of her dress.

The crying stopped. Lucy’s mouth hung open, the lips moist and loose. Fear makes children ugly.

‘It’s all right, Lucy.’ Eddie sat down on the chair beside hers and patted Lucy’s dark head. She jerked it away. ‘You’re a bit overexcited. That’s all it is.’

‘That’s not all it is.’ Angel tugged open the drawer where they kept the kitchen cutlery. ‘She needs a lesson. They all need a lesson.’

Eddie rubbed his aching forehead. ‘
Who
need a lesson? I don’t understand.’

Angel whirled round. In her hand was a pair of long scissors with orange plastic handles. She pointed them at Eddie, and the blades flashed. ‘You’ll never understand. You’re too stupid.’

He looked at the table and noticed the swirl of the grain around a knot shaped like a snail. He wished he were dead.

‘If they do wrong,’ Angel shouted, ‘they have to pay for it. How else can they make things right?’

Eddie examined the snail. He wanted to say:
But she only spilled some Ribena.

‘And if they don’t want to, then I shall
make
them.’ Angel’s face was ablaze. ‘We all have to suffer. So why shouldn’t they?’

But who are ‘they’? The four girls or –

‘Come here, Lucy,’ Angel said softly.

Lucy didn’t move.

Angel sprang across the kitchen, the scissors raised in her right hand.

‘No,’ Eddie said, trying to get up. ‘You mustn’t.’

With her left hand, Angel seized Lucy by the hair and dragged her to her feet. Lucy screamed. Oddly detached, Eddie noticed that there were toast crumbs and a long stain of yolk on the green Laura Ashley dress.

Angel pulled Lucy by the hair. Lucy wrapped one arm round a table leg and screamed. Angel pulled harder. The table juddered a few inches over the kitchen floor.

‘Angel, let her go. Someone might hear.’

Lucy squealed. Angel yanked the little girl away from the table. She towered over Lucy, holding the scissors high above the girl’s head.

‘No, Angel, no!’ Eddie cried. ‘Please, Angel, no.’

‘But that those phantasms appear often, and do frequent Cæmeteries, Charnel-houses and Churches, it is because those are the dormitories of the dead …’

Religio Medici
, I, 37

If you wanted a model for the devil, you could find worse than David Byfield. Not one of the coarser manifestations: Uncle David would be a sophisticated devil, the sort who charms or terrifies according to his whim.

‘You’re being very foolish.’ The old priest’s voice was quiet but carrying; Uncle David had learned to fill the empty spaces of churches in the days before public-address systems.

Wide-eyed, Sally stared up at him. St Michael’s filled with a blessed silence. Her mind had cleared as if a fever had receded, leaving her weak but in control. She concentrated on David Byfield, glorying in his ordinariness; he was real, safe and sane. He was wearing a dark, threadbare overcoat with a navy-blue scarf wound loosely round his neck, and between the woollen folds Sally glimpsed the white of his dog collar and old, sagging skin. He was neatly shaved. In the years since she had met him he had developed a stoop: his bony face curved over her like a gargoyle on a church roof.

‘At times like this,’ he went on, ‘you need company. You do not sit alone in dank churches.’ With a speed that took her by surprise, he placed his right palm lightly but firmly over the fingers of her left hand. ‘You’re freezing. You’ve probably had next to no breakfast. Is it any wonder that you’re seeing devils waving toasting forks?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ The echo of her thoughts unnerved her. ‘I was just thinking. And in my situation it’s not surprising I’m a little depressed.’

‘You’re doing more than thinking. You’re leaving yourself defenceless.’ He sat down in the pew in front of her and turned slowly towards her. ‘Devils – I should have known that word would embarrass you.’