I bought my ticket, nearly sick with relief, and made my way to the platform. I boarded the third-class carriage, the conductor barely giving Pickwick a second look, and made my way to a seat. I sat with my knees together, my hands folded on my lap, my dog curled again at my feet, lying down now and preparing to nap. A plump woman who smelled of mint settled next to me, and other passengers filled the car, talking, laughing, one man ostentatiously pulling out a thick novel and leaning into the corner of his seat.
Still I did not see any man who seemed to be following me, anyone I recognized. My shoulders were wrung as tight as laundry in a wringer, and cold sweat beaded under my arms and down the back of my neck.
The train began to move, the station pulled away from the window, and I stared out, unseeing, waiting for it all to begin.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
After my mother died, I got a single letter from Gloria Sutter. It was a card, hand printed on thick paper, the ink expensive and beautiful. On the front of the card was a drawing of a mermaid perched on a rock, her black hair flowing down her body and into the water. She was pebbled with inky scales, the forks of her tail drawn long and narrow. Her torso, bare and white, was turned toward the viewer, her hair covering her breasts, but the dip of her navel was visible above the line of her fishy waist. She held her arms out, palms up, as if making a deliberate gesture, and her expression was peaceful and almost sad.
On the inside of the card was written only: I am sorry. G.
I knew whose handwriting it was. When I touched the card I knew that Gloria had written it while sitting in a café somewhere on the banks of the Thames, watching the boats go by in the blistering summer heat. I knew that she looked as beautiful as ever, her shoulders pale in a sleeveless white dress, a scarf wound in her hair, her big dark eyes thoughtful for once.
A peace offering, then, if only a small one.
I looked at the front of the card again. Gloria had a painting of a mermaid in her flat, and I’d never had to ask her about it. We both knew. The mermaid, beautiful and freakish, a human woman yet not, a woman unable ever to live a normal human life. The mermaid, who lives her existence as the only one of her kind.
I tore up the card and threw it away, and then I went back to mourning my mother.
* * *
I jerked out of a momentary, uneasy doze. The woman who smelled of mint was gone, and I was alone in my seat. The other passengers in the third-class car to Kent were quiet, many of them sleeping.
The memory of the mermaid card had surfaced, vivid and entire, and I sat horrified at myself. I’d been so angry, so furiously shaken by my mother’s disgrace, her sickness and her death. I’d been nearly choked with grief, the blind unfairness of how my life had been pulled out from under me. How could I have known? How could I have been aware that the people around us, no matter how we feel about them, can be taken from us in the amount of time it takes to thrust a knife through the ribs? After all I’d been through, after all I’d seen, how could I not have known?
I pressed my hands to my eyes, fighting back tears. I took them away and noticed the girl across the aisle from me.
She was dressed smartly in a navy blue coat and hat, and she was in the depths of reading a movie magazine. The magazine hid most of her profile, but I could see the ends of a sleek black bob curling over her ears from under the brim of her hat. She crossed her legs, swinging one leg over the other.
I must have made some sort of sound because she lowered the magazine and looked at me. I swallowed. The girl was thirty-five at least, with a sizable nose and slightly crooked teeth. The eyebrows over her pale eyes were heavy and unkempt.
She caught me staring, and must have seen the shocked look on my face. “Well?” she said sharply, annoyed.
“Sorry,” I mumbled. I dropped my gaze and noticed that someone had left a newspaper on the seat next to me, where the minty woman had been sitting. UNKNOWN BOMBER STRIKES AGAIN, the headline read. FOUR DEAD AT GUILDFORD AIRPLANE FACTORY. And beneath that: HAVE BOLSHEVIKS INFILTRATED ENGLAND?
I vaguely recalled seeing similar headlines over the past weeks. There had been a string of bombings of factories and such, but I had been too wrapped up in my own problems to pay attention. I looked away from the newspaper and reached into my messenger bag—trying not to create enough movement to disturb Pickwick, who was slumbering on my feet—and pulled out the three telegrams I’d found in Gloria’s flask bag. I unfolded them and shook out the three small photographs, spreading them on my knees.
I studied the three faces, thinking of what Octavia had said about that final séance. I concluded, just as Octavia had, that Gloria had seen at least one of her brothers—if not all of them—that afternoon. I traced my fingers along the edges of the photographs, wondering. Which of them had she seen? Tommy, with his sweet, open face? Harry, with his dark beauty? Colin, with his bold, inscrutable features, so like Gloria’s own? What did the words I had no idea mean? To whom had she said, Good-bye, darling? And why had she been crying?
I sighed and flipped over the newspaper on the seat next to me. I looked for anything written about Ramona’s murder, but the sordid death of a cut-rate morphine-addict psychic was not news. Instead, the pages were dominated by the mysterious bombings; there had been four in all, all of them unsolved, with no group taking responsibility. The authorities were awash in theories. Anarchists? Labour fanatics? Fascists? Communists? Germans? Irish Republicans? Did the fact that two of the targets were factories mean that unions or Bolsheviks were involved? No one knew, and in the meantime each successive bombing claimed a handful of lives.
I picked up the paper and used it as a cover to take a surreptitious glance around the train car, wondering whether I had a pursuer looking at me right then. If so, he was looking only at a girl reading a newspaper on a train car, as concerned as any other Londoner about whether there were Bolsheviks in her midst.
I glanced down at the photographs again, Gloria’s three brothers looking up at me. Something about them bothered me, twigged something in my mind that I couldn’t quite place. But before I could think too much on it, the conductor announced Charing, and the journey was nearly over.
* * *
I disembarked along with an elderly couple and a woman with two small children. I inquired at the station about hiring a motorcar, and the route to the Dubbses’ house. The stationmaster told me that the only driver available—the only driver ever available—had just suffered a breakdown of his motorcar not an hour before and wouldn’t be going anywhere today. However, if I really needed to get somewhere, I could rent a bicycle for a reasonable fee.
I hesitated. I hadn’t expected something so important to go wrong so early. It was tempting to panic—the plan had me driving to the Dubbses’ in a motorcar. Besides, I wasn’t very experienced in bicycle riding, and my dress and stockings were hardly appropriate cycling wear. And what about Pickwick? On the other hand, I could simply bicycle up the same road I’d intended to drive. What should I do?
For a second I wished myself home, in my mother’s bedroom with the curtains closed, far out of sight of Gloria’s murderer. What I was attempting seemed insane. But the plan was already in motion, the police already in place. I had no hope of ever finding the man I sought, a man who came and murdered and left again without being seen. My only choice was to make him come to me. You can do this, Ellie.
“I’ll take the bicycle,” I said.
It was a sturdy contraption with wide handlebars and a low seat. I had hoped for a basket to put Pickwick in, but I had no such luck. I need not have worried, because as I awkwardly wheeled the bicycle away from the station, Pickwick, well rested, picked up his tail and pranced alongside me, eagerly sniffing the greenery and tugging on his leash. The countryside seemed to revive him. I promised him that I wouldn’t cycle too fast—as if there were a chance of that—so that he wouldn’t tire.
I mounted up a
nd began. It took some getting used to, and I banged my ankles sharply against the body of the bicycle more than once, but as I left Charing and made my way out into the countryside, I began to find a rhythm. I slung my bag backward against the small of my back and pedaled. Pickwick trotted alongside me, and after a while I dismounted and unhooked him from his leash as he showed no inclination to run away. He wasn’t a young dog, but my cycling skills weren’t much of a challenge, and as we went along together I was reminded of how happy I was to have him with me.
The countryside was in full early-autumn glow, the grass still a gentle green but the trees beginning to turn red, yellow, and orange, like a painter playing with his palette. The sky was chalky white, the air warm, and I passed brick red houses with pretty terraces and cottages with thatched roofs. Hedgerows lined the road in places, and I cycled up and down a few gentle slopes. Kent may have been outside of London—and so a foreign country to a great many Londoners—but it was hardly wild; instead, it was a pretty patchwork of farms and cottages, churches and bridges, like a great garden. It didn’t seem the place where anyone could be murdered. But my shoulders stayed tense and the back of my neck felt raw, as if someone had flayed the skin off. I was almost certain I was being watched.
After a while I stopped at the top of a hill, pretending that I was not gasping for breath, that sweat was not soaking my back between my shoulder blades. I put my feet on the ground and looked around me, letting the teasing breeze cool my skin. Pickwick circled back to me from the bushes at the side of the road and waited for me, a polite question in his eyes. I twisted in my position and looked behind me, wondering where my guardians might be. Around that farmhouse over there? Behind that stone wall, those hedgerows? Beneath that bridge, or in that clump of trees, or behind the long wooden fence to the left? Which roads were they watching, and how were they staying hidden? The peaceful Kent countryside seemed to have an infinite number of spots where a man could crouch unseen. No one could jump out and garrote me in daylight on a bicycle, at least, but I worried for James. Where was he? Had my lure worked? Was the man from Ramona’s apartment watching me even now?
There was nothing for it. I got back on the bicycle and pushed the pedals, deliberately forcing my mind away. Instead, I thought of the last time I’d seen Gloria.
It was November 1923, over a year after my mother’s death. I’d been standing in Fortnum and Mason, staring at a display of teas, when I heard a familiar voice over my shoulder.
“Hello, darling.”
Gloria was wearing a tweed jacket and matching hat that made her look like a rich man’s spoiled young wife on a shopping trip. She wore lipstick so dark it was almost mulberry purple, the shade startling against her pale skin, and I immediately felt the impulse to yank out my handkerchief and blot it off.
She raised an eyebrow at me. “Doing a bit of shopping?”
I didn’t need any tea, but I’d been desperate to leave the silence of the house. “Yes,” I replied, trying to sound sophisticated, casual. “And you?”
She gave me a knowing twist of that dark mouth, and I wondered why I had even tried to fool her. Gloria always knew when I was lying. “Darling, tea doesn’t interest me. If it doesn’t have gin in it, I don’t drink it.”
No, Gloria never shopped for tea, and she never shopped in Fortnum and Mason. She was standing there because she’d seen me; that was the only reason. And suddenly, past my grief and my anger, I was so pathetically glad to see her that I had to look away. “How have you been, Gloria?”
“Here’s what I think,” she said, ignoring my question. “You’ll either take a walk with me, or you won’t. Part of you wants to, and part of you wants me to walk away. The question is, which part of you will win?”
They were bold words, confident and challenging, but I knew better. I knew by the underlying quaver in her voice—undetectable by anyone who didn’t know her as I did—that it was a question, an invitation. That she didn’t know whether I would say yes. And that, in some part of her, it mattered.
It crumbled all of my defenses, that small quaver in her voice. Ever since my mother had died, since I’d torn up the beautiful mermaid card and thrown it out, I had been suffocatingly lonely in a way that had almost shocked me. I had been a cipher even to myself, an invisible woman. With Gloria’s small overture, a year of anger, which I had fought so desperately to hang on to, slipped away. It hurt, but I felt something like relief, too.
I managed a shrug. “Yes,” I said.
The day was chilled, the sun fighting to escape from behind a bank of clouds. We headed down Piccadilly, away from Piccadilly Circus, moving through the crowds, not speaking. Gloria walked half a step ahead of me, the shoulder of her tweed jacket aligned with my collarbone. I could see the white column of her neck under the bobbed edge of her hair and her cloche hat, the winking movement of an earring. I could smell her perfume. I had followed her into any number of restaurants and clubs this way, just at her shoulder, watching the gaze of every man in the room land on her before traveling idly to me. It was the natural order of things, bruisingly familiar.
I followed her into the calm of Green Park and we took one of the paths, the disintegrating leaves blowing like dust under our footsteps, the tall trees indifferent overhead. Even in November, Green Park was busy, Londoners taking the chance to stroll this stretch of relative quiet as the chill wind blew.
We stopped at Constitution Hill, and Gloria leaned on the wrought-iron fence, fishing in her pocket for a cigarette case. I crossed my arms over my chest and watched her.
“Thank you for the card,” I managed at last.
She crooked a penciled eyebrow at me and searched her pocket again.
I sighed. “Do you want me to stay angry at you or not?”
Gloria found the cigarette case and straightened. “She wanted to quit, Ellie. I only provided the excuse.”
“Ah, so that’s why you arranged it, then? From the goodness of your heart?”
“No, of course not. I told you from the first that I don’t like competition.”
“You’ve taken care of it very nicely, then.”
“Not exactly.” She placed an unlit cigarette between her lips and watched me, her eyes hooded. She dropped the case back into her pocket and pulled out her matches. I had the urge, as I often did with Gloria, to put my hand on her. To feel the energy that came from her like heat. “The Fantastique is still in business, after all. But she doesn’t do séances anymore.”
“No.”
“Finding lost things, is it? Interesting, I suppose.” She shrugged. She knew what I was doing—of course she knew. She always made it her business. “I wondered what you would do once you were free of her.”
“Free of her?” My skin stung as if I’d been slapped. My own guilt rushed over me. I was free of her—free of having to please her, free of having to do the séances. Free of caring for her in those last months. “I didn’t want to be free of her.”
Something flashed across Gloria’s eyes. “For God’s sake, Ellie. You still think that what I did was all about your mother, don’t you? That she was the target.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I did it because it needed to end,” she said bluntly. “The lies, the foolishness. You living half an existence, sitting behind a curtain, helping her. You with a power you’ve been made to feel ashamed of, living nothing of a life.” She pushed herself off the fence and took a drag off her cigarette. “Have you ever thought, Ellie, that we’ve been given the greatest insight into life and death in the history of mankind? The answers weren’t given to a philosopher, or a religious leader, or a great scholar, or even a man. It was given to two girls, flappers who everyone sees as silly nuisances, cartoons, figures of fun. Girls who can’t even vote.” She tapped one finger against her temple through the cloth of her hat with a ruby-polished nail. “All of the secrets of the universe, of life
and death, are sitting right here. A hundred people have walked past us on the street, and not a single one of them knows it.”
I shook my head. “You’re the one who enjoys the power, Gloria. It was never me.”
“I don’t enjoy it,” she corrected me. She dropped her cigarette to the ground and stepped on it. “I simply refuse to feel ashamed of it, to feel ashamed of anything. I’m supposed to feel ashamed of how I look, how I dress, the language I use, the makeup I wear. For staying out late, for dancing, for making money, for thinking things and being angry and asking questions. For letting a man go to bed with me, when he can just button up his pants and never feel a lick of shame for the rest of his life. And I say all of it can go to hell.”
My blood was pounding in my head, my cheeks flushing. I was powerfully angry, I realized, and it wasn’t at her. “Stop it.”
“Most of all, I’m supposed to be ashamed of my power,” she continued, as if I hadn’t spoken. “For being born with something the world has never seen. And I was ashamed of it—I never told you that, but I was. Until my brothers died, and George disowned me. That broke me, Ellie, in a way that you cannot imagine, but it also freed me. Because I suddenly realized: What is the point? Why waste your life being ashamed when you’re going to be dead anyway? So I make money and I drink too much gin and I fall in with worthless men and my family hates me. I have headaches and nightmares that would ice the skin off you. But I’m living my life, Ellie, and I make no apologies for it. Can you say the same?”
Overhead, two birds called to each other, back and forth, a quick trill of notes. A couple strolled by, oblivious of us, her hand on his arm, his shoulder leaning into hers as he spoke something in her ear. I sighed, willing my heartbeat back to normal. “Give me a cigarette,” I said.
The Other Side of Midnight Page 24