Voices in the Dark (27 page)

Someone was hammering on the door suddenly. Leo raised a hand to his head. ‘Go upstairs,’ he mouthed to me. I caught his eyes and tried to tell him in a look that I was still his son no matter what happened now, no matter what divided us. Then I had to turn and push Jasmine inside and close the door behind us both. The cheerful firelight of the living room seemed absurd, like a stage set for someone else’s life. A fierce snowstorm was howling round the house now; we did not hear the side door close. Jasmine ran to my mother and buried her face in her dress and cried.

Leo had forgotten one of his old boots in the hurry; it lay stupidly between the bedroom and the door. I could not stay there and let him leave on his own. ‘I’m going after him,’ I said, picking up the boot. ‘He might need this. I’ll be back.’

When I opened the door, the snow howled through it in a torrent. It was pouring out of the sky so fast it was a solid force in the air, an early storm that would barely settle but
that obscured the whole city. The flakes clung to my eyelashes and drove into my mouth. I turned and started towards the harbour. ‘Father!’ I shouted. ‘Leo!’

I was running downhill; that was the only way I could tell I was going in the right direction. The houses on either side were just black shadows; the gas lamps were plastered with ice and gave no light at all. Someone was shouting behind me. Whether it was one of the Imperial Order or the police or just a trader in the nearest market, I could not tell, but I ran on. The wind was so merciless that it snatched my breath; I could not shout for him. I ran instead. Eventually I made out the dim lights of the harbour through the storm. Figures in red uniforms were ushering a few men towards the end of a long line. ‘Papa!’ I shouted.

One of the men broke away and started towards me. We met in the driving snow between the harbour and the buildings. ‘Anselm, why did you follow me?’ he said.

‘I don’t know.’

He put his hand on my shoulder. His fingers were very strong in that moment; his hand on my shoulder was the only real thing in the snowstorm that surrounded us. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Whatever happens – whatever wrongs I’ve done – I did love you, Anselm. And your mother and Jasmine. Will you tell them?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘You were the one who saved me,’ he said. ‘It was you most of all, in the end. Did you know that?’

I shook my head. The wind drove the tears from my eyes, and they burned my face with cold. ‘What about the baby?’ I said. ‘What about Mother?’

‘Anselm,’ he said. ‘It breaks your heart, but I believe you find a way of surviving. I really believe it.’

‘Move along now; move along!’ the officers were shouting.

‘Take care of them,’ he said. ‘I promise you, I will try to find a way, but I just don’t know any more.’

A well-dressed woman in the nearest house glanced out at us, her lamplight illuminating suddenly the square of grey slush on which we stood. She frowned, then pulled her shawl tighter around her, as if to shield herself from such a pathetic sight. Leo was standing there with his nose running. I was crying and did not care.

‘Anselm, I’m sorry,’ he said. Then he broke away from me and joined the line. They were all men like him, with shabby overcoats and old suitcases and tired smokers’ eyes. I watched them descend towards the harbour. Then, after a while, I could not tell which one was Leo any more. It was only then that I realized his old army boot was still in my hand. I had run all the way to the harbour with it and had forgotten to give it to him.

I was in darkness now; the snow in the air was the only light. The gas lamps stood obscured by the blizzard. The snow slid down their panes and made the lights flicker feebly. Then, as I reached the end of Trader’s Row, it began to recede altogether. It hesitated, as though drawn back up into the air, and the gaslight spread its glow across the silent street. I walked slowly through the last flakes to the door of the shop.

The back room was full of melting snow; it lay in a drift from the door to the bottom of the stairs, with the moonlight shining coldly on it. I must have forgotten to close the door behind me. I tried to kick it aside, then gave up. I heard it dripping below me as I walked up the stairs. Jasmine was still clutching the Harold North books when I got back. Her
face was pale and blotched with crying. My mother was staring at the fire, sitting awkwardly in the armchair because of her swelling stomach. I closed the door quietly behind me.

‘Well!’ said my grandmother. ‘Now that Leo has given up his responsibilities, someone must take charge. I will go and fetch my things tomorrow morning. In your condition, Maria, you cannot be in the house on your own.’

‘Mother, I’m fine.’

‘Nonsense.’

We were all too dejected to argue. We let her lecture us, detailing her plans as though this was some army campaign. There were two police officers in the alley opposite; I could make out the blazing red of their uniforms in the dark. Even so, none of us slept that night. We sat up around the fire, watching the wind trouble the flames. ‘Will Father be at Holy Island yet?’ said Jasmine at about eleven o’clock. I’d had to tell them where he was going.

‘He might be halfway to the west coast by now,’ said my mother. ‘If the snow has not stopped them. He will have to go all the way along the river, and then cross the countryside by coach, and then take another ship to Holy Island.’

We fell into silence again. Traces of Leo’s presence were everywhere, things he had left carelessly as he fled and things that he could not have taken. The ring with his initials, which my mother turned around on her finger, and his old leather jacket that I still wore. And the look of him in Jasmine’s eyes.

‘He’ll be back for my play, won’t he?’ she said.

My mother stroked her hair. ‘You know your papa – he never misses anything if he doesn’t have a good reason.’

‘That means no,’ said Jasmine. ‘Doesn’t it?’ Neither of us
answered. ‘If he doesn’t come back, I won’t ever speak to him,’ said Jasmine. ‘Why did he have to go away?’

‘It was not his fault,’ I said.

A dismal silence fell again. ‘Where’s Holy Island?’ said Jasmine.

‘Get the atlas and I’ll show you,’ said my mother.

Jasmine ran to fetch it. It was my old atlas; Leo had bought it for me from a trader he knew in my second year at Sacred Heart Infant School. The borders were already out of date. ‘There,’ said Jasmine, pointing to Holy Island on the map. ‘A hundred miles.’

‘I thought you could see it from the highest tower of the castle,’ I said. ‘That was what Papa always told me.’

My mother shook her head. ‘People like him can. No one else.’

I supposed she meant people with powers.

‘There,’ Jasmine said, drawing a line in red pencil straight from Malonia City to Holy Island.

‘Don’t do that,’ said my mother. ‘It won’t come off.’

She drew another line defiantly. ‘I hate Malonia,’ she said. She scribbled over the page, pressing so hard that the pencil went through the paper.

‘We should have gone with him,’ said my mother, and shivered.

At midnight, I wandered down to the yard and stood in the snow. It was already melting. I thought perhaps Leo would come trailing back up the street and tell us he had changed his mind. And standing there in the dark, I thought of Michael. When his father had been taken to the government hospital two years ago with a failing heart, he had stood under my window and thrown gravel at the pane until I woke. I had sat beside him while he waited, and he would
have done the same for me, but now he was gone and I didn’t know where. And Aldebaran could have helped us, but he was unjustly killed, and no one seemed to remember. I wondered if this was how it always was when someone went away from you. It only made you miss the other people the more fiercely.

The snow began to fall again, robbing the city of all colour. I turned and went back inside. I wandered about the shop performing Leo’s usual tasks – sweeping the floor and turning down the stove and bolting the doors and windows. I counted up the day’s takings and took them to the safe. I never usually opened it, but it could not be helped today. I turned the dials to the combination Leo had set and hit the side to shake the broken lock free. It let out a mournful clang when I did it. I put the money into the case on the top shelf.

As I pushed the door closed again, I noticed something. On the bottom shelf, under a dusty box of jewellery and the parcel from Aldebaran marked
To the baby
, there was a pile of papers in Leo’s writing. I pulled them out and held them close to the lamp. Half of them were the story I had already seen, stapled to the other pages so that they formed a makeshift book. And there was more, several pages, and the word
FINISH
at the end. The sheets were bound together neatly with string.

‘Anselm,’ sniffed Jasmine from the doorway, making me start and turn. ‘What’s that you’re holding?’

‘Nothing,’ I said.

‘Let me see.’

I handed the pages to her. ‘It’s something Papa wrote,’ I said.

‘What is it, then?’

‘A story. I don’t know.’

‘Read it to me?’ she said. ‘Please. Then it will be like Papa is here.’

‘Oh, Jas.’ I shrugged. ‘I don’t think it’s that kind of story.’

She sniffed and handed it back. Perhaps that was worse than anything. On any ordinary day, Jasmine would have snatched the papers out of my hand and begged me to read them to her until I gave in. But tonight she just trailed back upstairs with her blanket wrapped around her and went to her bedroom and put out the light. I closed the safe again.

I left the papers on my desk while I lay awake in the dark; they gleamed palely under the moon. Every time I drew near to sleep that night, it escaped me. But I must have slept eventually, because when I did, I dreamed. I could see Leo struggling through the blizzard at a grey stone port and the sea foaming white with the snow that troubled it. And then it was another man, a man with reddish hair like my own, who turned and walked away into the night. I started and sat up. After that dream, I could not sleep again. I was more and more haunted by him, my real father. Perhaps it would be worse now that Leo was gone.

There was nothing I could do, and the night stretched away from me in all directions. I lit the lamp and began to read those papers. It was a strange story, and I did not understand it. It began with the lord Rigel and his daughter and Aldebaran and England. But at least it kept the dark at bay.

Mr Hardy shook his head after I finished telling him that story. It was ten o’clock, and the coach was about to leave. He went on shaking his head. A muscle twitched under his eye with a flickering movement, making him look very old and frail suddenly. ‘Are you all right?’ I asked him.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, I am all right.’ He coughed. ‘Go on. Tell me what happened next.’

But we were leaving now. The others were already climbing up into the coach. He could not get to his feet, so I helped him, and we crossed the yard like that. ‘Go on with the story,’ he said again. ‘As soon as we reach the next inn, you must tell me.’

‘I will,’ I said. ‘But, sir, I don’t understand. Why are you so interested?’

He just shook his head.

I gave him those papers to read instead. I could tell from the way his eyes moved restlessly that something troubled him, and I knew them almost by heart anyway. I knew how the story went on. I stared out at the dark moorland, towards the black line that must be the sea beyond the snow-covered cliffs.

‘Here,’ said the woman then, touching my shoulder. She was handing round biscuits and cold tea.

We had hardly spoken a word to her since we set out. Mr Hardy smiled and took a biscuit, and I took one, and she gave us a nervous smile and hid herself behind her little boy again, making
much of stroking his hair and checking if his hands were cold. But the boy was looking up at us both now with interest.

‘What’s your name?’ he asked me.

‘Anselm,’ I said.

‘I’m Matthew,’ he said.

‘Esther,’ whispered his mother.

The little boy looked up at Mr Hardy. ‘Harlan,’ said the old man after a minute.

‘Harlan?’ I said. He gave me a quick glance. He must have got it from our talk of Harlan Smith and that book, but I did not know why he had given a false name.

The woman and her son were watching us curiously. Mr Hardy met my eyes, then turned away and drank his tea carefully. The tin cup rattled in his hand, which was shaking badly. He seemed to be growing weaker on this journey. I watched the line of the sea draw close to us, then run alongside the coach road, its waves breaking close and very black against the edge of the snow. After a while, Mr Hardy went on reading. I knew the words he read, and I repeated them in my mind. It was something to drive out the cold.

Juliette woke because she was troubled by strange dreams. Outside, the orange London darkness showed no sign of lifting. She rested her head against the window frame, and her heart felt cold in her chest, as though she was still in the dark beside a strange river and did not know what was ahead.

Richard was out. She did not know where the offices of his solicitors’ firm were, but she supposed that was where he was now. The clock on the mantelpiece stood at twelve. Juliette threw a dressing gown around her shoulders and crossed the carpeted landing to her father’s door. The study
was darkened, but she thought she would go in and wait for him. It was what she often used to do when she was small.

Richard had always had a study, though he never worked in it. Juliette stood in front of the desk and spun the old-fashioned globe, and stared at it and made it go on spinning longer than was possible. She pretended she was a great woman, and the globe was enchanted to go on spinning for ever. She could not remember how she had learned these tricks. She had tried to ask Richard about them once, but he had shaken his head and refused to see the paper that was crumpling in her hand. Afterwards, she did not dare to tell him again. That was just after he’d told her about their old country and her mother dying. Ever since then, she had been able to do impossible things.