Voices in the Dark (43 page)

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘And I don’t think gambling is a very bad sin,’ she said. ‘Not like killing someone, or hurting a little baby, or being in the Imperial Order.’

I almost smiled at her earnestness. She was halfway to sleep now.

‘Anselm?’ she said. ‘Do you think it will be all right, acting a real play in front of important people? I keep thinking about it.’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘You’ll forget about being nervous at all when you are acting.’

‘This will be the start of my career as an actress.’

‘That’s right.’

‘It’s in the Royal Gardens, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Billy says he saw them putting up the stage.’

I nodded. She was lying with one eye open, as if to check I was still watching over her. ‘You know that prophecy?’ she said.

‘Yes.’

‘You know the last-descendant part?’

‘Yes.’ I had to whisper, ‘What, Jasmine?’ several times before she heard me. She rolled over and murmured the answer, already halfway to sleep. By the time I deciphered it, she was gone. She had whispered, ‘It means the baby.’

* * *

We did not mention that conversation the next day, but it weighed heavier and heavier on my mind. Jasmine was in a state of high excitement about her play; even the troops marching through the city could not crush it. But when we were down in the yard, shovelling snow from the door on my grandmother’s orders, she kept breaking off to stare at the gap between the houses. ‘What are you doing?’ I asked her at last.

‘Trying to make Papa come home.’

I paused, halfway to lifting a shovelful of gritty snow into the barrow. For a moment, I was certain he would appear there, dragging his battered suitcase with the belt around it, a cigarette jammed in his mouth. But no one came. The street was in darkness. Christmas lanterns were hanging along the washing line of the middle apartment. They swung in the wind, and the line sang mournfully, almost too low to hear.

‘I think he will,’ she said. ‘I really do. I think I can make him come back.’

‘Maybe you can,’ I said.

‘He has to see my play.’

We had walked home past the Royal Gardens and had seen the stage and the barriers where the thousands of people would stand to watch the play and the king’s speech. The whole city would be there.

‘I wish I could go to see Jasmine acting,’ said my mother that evening, sipping tea and shivering. My grandmother had dragged Jasmine off to Mass to stop her from running about the living room reciting her part.

‘She will tell you all about it,’ I said.

‘Yes.’ She was sitting up in bed, watching a few snowflakes fall past the narrow back window. They were too
large to look real, very bright against the grimy stone of the buildings. ‘Anselm?’ she said then. ‘Is something wrong? I hardly seem to see you any more.’

I was halfway to the door. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Nothing is wrong.’

‘Don’t go. Come and sit with me a while.’

I went back reluctantly and sat on the edge of the bed. She was studying my face, but I could not look at her. I watched the steam rising from the surface of the tea instead. ‘There is something,’ she said.

‘No.’

‘You don’t even look at me any more.’

‘I do,’ I said. But I was not looking at her even when I said it.

‘Anselm?’ she said, and touched the side of my face so that I had to meet her eyes. They were awash with tears.

‘What is it?’ I said, startled.

‘Listen,’ she said. ‘Anselm, listen.’

‘What is it?’

She handed me something. It had been in the pocket of her dressing gown. A folded scrap of paper in an envelope. I opened it and held it to the light of the lamp. It was a warrant, with the Imperial Order’s sign at the top, for Leo’s arrest.

‘Who brought this?’ I asked.

‘It was slipped under the door. Someone had readdressed it from our shop – Mr Pascal probably.’ Her voice became hardly comprehensible on the last words. The tears fell from her eyes, and she shuddered with grief. ‘Is this why he left?’ she said. ‘Is that why he went away? Because the Imperial Order want to kill him?’

I tried to touch her arm. She fought me away suddenly.

‘You knew! Why didn’t you tell me? You knew, Anselm!’

‘I didn’t … I couldn’t tell you – I didn’t want to worry you. Please, don’t cry.’

‘Worry me?’ she said. ‘Do you think I was not worried? Believing Leo had left us for ever? Thinking he didn’t send an address because he didn’t want to see us ever again?’

‘How could you think that?’

‘I don’t know!’ she said with a trace of anger. ‘I don’t know, Anselm, how I could be stupid enough—’

‘I didn’t mean that you were stupid, but, Mother, listen …’

She surrendered to tears. They racked her whole body. I did not know what to say, and I looked at the warrant instead. The final words hit me coldly in the stomach:
Wanted for his conspiracy in the murder of Ahira
.

‘Anselm, there is something else,’ she said. ‘It’s what it says he did.’

‘“His conspiracy in the murder of Ahira,”’ I said.

At the name Ahira, she shivered. ‘Anselm, it’s not just that it makes him a murderer. If you had any idea …’ She trailed off and shivered again. I hesitated. I knew what she was talking about, but I did not know if I had the courage to say it.

‘Mother,’ I said eventually. ‘I know about him. Ahira. I know all about it.’

Her crying froze as she looked at me. The tears rolled down her face and came to rest in the corners of her mouth.

‘I know about my real father,’ I said. ‘And I thought Leo might have had something to do with him dying, right from the start. I don’t know how. The two stories seemed to make sense like that.’ I was startled by my own voice. It held
very steady, and it was easier to go on now than turn back. ‘But why didn’t you tell me any of this?’ I said. ‘I don’t understand why you let me grow up without knowing.’

She shook her head. She went on shaking it, looking at me as if she had never really seen me before. ‘How could I tell you?’ she said eventually. She tried to brush the tears from her face, but more fell. ‘Anselm, if Leo did shoot him, what are we going to do? What on earth are we going to do? How are we going to carry on living?’

‘We can’t pretend everything is still all right,’ I said. ‘Mama, don’t you have any idea if he did or didn’t?’

‘I don’t know the truth,’ she said. ‘I don’t know if he did or didn’t do it. But I think …’ She shuddered again. ‘I think he did. Anselm, he talks in his sleep – he has for years. He confesses things that he never would say in real life.’

‘Then I don’t know how things can ever be the same,’ I said.

She went on crying. She reached for my hand, and I let her take it, though I felt nothing. I felt like we had all divided from each other weeks ago, when things started to go wrong, and I could not close the distance between us now. ‘What are we going to do?’ she said. ‘Anselm, what on earth are we going to do?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

‘Ahira was a hated man,’ she said. ‘Someone else would have done it. Anyone would. That’s what I always told myself when I first suspected Leo …’

My hands were trembling slightly, like an old man’s. ‘What I don’t understand,’ I said,‘is why you don’t hate me too.’ She glanced up with a quick breath, as though she was in pain. ‘I look like him,’ I said, and now my voice lost its
composure. ‘Everyone thinks so. Didn’t you hate me? Didn’t you wish I’d never been born?’

‘Anselm, don’t say that.’

‘But why not? I look like him – I have his same features and his red hair. And maybe I’m even like him. I don’t know.’

‘You are nothing like him!’

‘The whole thing is such a cheap story.’

‘Anselm, it sounds so terrible in theory. I sound like such a slut and a stupid, worthless girl, and your father sounds nothing but evil. And, yes, I should have hated you, in theory. But listen to me. Life isn’t a theory like that.’

‘Isn’t it?’ I said.

‘No! Of course it isn’t.’

She touched the side of my face. I closed my eyes and let her go on; I did not have the heart to stop her. ‘I thought I was dying when you were born,’ she said. ‘I was only fifteen – the worst pain I had lived through was a sprain in my ankle when I fell off riding.’ She half laughed and half sobbed. ‘And then suddenly it was all over, and they put you in my arms, this tiny baby not even crying, and I loved you. And you were the best thing that happened to me, Anselm, when he was the worst, and he was the reason I thought I’d lost everything, but you were the reason I had to get up and start again. I couldn’t have seen it like that until it happened, but that was how it was.’

‘And what?’ I said. I sounded like a sulky child, which was not fair, because my heart was breaking.

‘Of course it’s complicated,’ she said. ‘I used to pray that it was not true; I used to pray that I would wake up and everything would be like it was before I met him. But after you were born, I started praying the opposite. I started to
pray that nothing would happen to take you away from me. Anselm, I loved you more, I think, because I never expected to. You are the one thing that redeems him for me. You are everything he would have been if he had been a good man. I even find I’m less afraid of him now, because I know you. All that was stupid, that superstitious fear I had of him. He was just a man.’

‘I’m not good,’ I said. ‘I’ve done bad things too. If you knew …’ I could not go on; tears were obscuring my voice.

‘Shh,’ she said. ‘Hey, Anselm. Anselm. Don’t cry like that. Please. It is not so terrible. It will be all right.’

It reminded me of when I cried when I was a little boy, and she would try to comfort me with any old words that came into her head. ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘Everyone is just a person who makes mistakes and does things wrong, sometimes in the full knowledge that they are evil, yes, and sometimes for no reason. But no one is the devil incarnate. Not even him.’

‘But Ahira—’

‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘Not even him.’

‘Didn’t you hate me?’ I said. ‘Ever?’

‘I expected to,’ she said quietly. ‘But everything works out differently from what you first intend.’

I still could not look at her. But she reached out to take my hand again, and I let her. ‘Leo loves you like his own son,’ she said. ‘He always has. You saved him, Anselm. You really did. You were the only one who could bring him back to life after Stirling died. I don’t believe everything happens for a reason, but sometimes I’ve come close to it. And even now, even with this’ – she nodded towards the warrant resting on my knees – ’I still wish we could go back to how things used to be. Is that stupid?’

I could not speak. She gripped my hand tighter. ‘What shall we do?’ she said. ‘Tell me what to do, Anselm.’

I picked up the warrant. It stood there in black letters:
his conspiracy in the murder of Ahira
. Somewhere out there, the truth existed, the heartless fact of who had fired the shot. I hesitated. Then I threw the warrant into the fire. I did not know I had decided to do it until it was already done. And I knew it was for the better not to know. The past is the past, like Jasmine said. Things were bad enough already.

We watched the page curl and vanish. My mother raised a hand to brush my hair back from my forehead, then stopped with a strange expression.

‘What is it?’ I said. ‘Are you in pain?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘No, it’s all right. Just the baby kicking.’

And in spite of everything, we could not help taking it as a sign.

‘So that was what you did,’ said Mr Hardy after a long silence. ‘You never mentioned it again?’

I shook my head.

‘And what about the prophecy?’ he said. ‘And what about Jasmine’s play? And what about Leo? Were they all right?’

‘There isn’t much more to tell,’ I said. ‘I’ll finish it now.’

‘Mama isn’t coming to my play, is she?’ Jasmine asked me on Christmas Eve. She had crept across the living room before it was yet light and woken me. I turned over. I had not been dreaming, and the absence of dreams surprised me. Usually I had to drag myself back into reality from a thick fog of nightmares. But today, nothing. Just the white snow light beyond the curtains and Jasmine’s face leaning over me.

‘No,’ I said, and sat up. ‘Sorry, Jasmine. She is too sick to go and stand with all those crowds.’

‘Will Papa come back for it?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘No,’ she said seriously. ‘Neither do I.’ She went to the hearth and dressed there in the faint heat of the fire, braiding her hair carefully in the ornate mirror. My grandmother was bustling about, setting pans on the stove with a loud clattering.

‘I will be there,’ I told Jasmine. ‘Whatever else happens.’ She gave me a quick smile.

My mother was trying not to cry as she said goodbye to Jasmine; I could tell by the brightness of her smile. Jasmine would go with the rest of her class straight to the Royal Gardens, and we would not see her until the evening. I missed her as I walked home from school. My grandmother and I left early, in our Sunday clothes. Father Dunstan was
going to call in on my mother on his way past. I could tell as we descended the four flights of stairs that the rest of the building was empty. It made my heart ache, to leave my mother here while the rest of the city hurried past her towards the Royal Gardens.

The place was already packed; we had to stand at the back of the crowd. There were soldiers everywhere, lined up against the fences with rifles on their shoulders. Overhead, the snow clouds were drifting fast. People stood close to coal braziers and pulled their shawls and scarves up over their faces.

‘Where will Jasmine be?’ my grandmother asked anxiously, standing on her toes to try and see through the crowd.

‘I didn’t know there would be so many people,’ I said. ‘I hope she isn’t nervous.’

‘Would Jasmine ever be nervous?’

I almost smiled. My grandmother and I had not made our peace, but the atmosphere united us. When the snow clouds parted, I could see a few stars. The crowds stretched in every direction, more solemn and motionless than they were on any national holiday. I pulled Leo’s old jacket tighter around me. Over the dark and overgrown far wall, I could see the top of Ahira’s house. I wondered if that boy and girl were still there beside their fire. I hoped they were far from here, already on some journey.