The Magdalena Curse

by F. G. Cottam

  Oblensky had her stripped and her skin rubbed with candle tallow and then zipped into his own goose feather sleeping bag. The trick was not to warm the body too fast, not to let the brain know quite how profoundly cold the body had become. If that happened, the brain would simply switch the body off and the exposure victim would die. Avoiding that and encouraging recovery was an art and it was a science. They put her on a cot. Oblensky himself dripped vodka into her mouth from a forefinger dipped in the glass. The cot was drawn incrementally closer to the heat of the stove in their cabin. Occasionally they turned her. The heat of the stove was kept constant and they were patient as they coaxed her back to life. Oblensky sent out a combat patrol to discover what had frightened the woman. It returned empty handed. After twenty hours she regained consciousness. The men were asleep now but for their vigilant commander, a glass in his hand and a cigarette burning in the ashtray beside him. Her eyes opened and he leaned forward.

  ‘Wölfe?’

  German. She had no Russian. German was the language in which she conducted what brief communication she enjoyed with the major. ‘Ja,’ she said. ‘Wölfe.’

  He nodded. They never discussed the matter again. Two days later she was airlifted out. Her mind persuaded her, she assumed aboard the flight, that she would have a better chance of staying sane in her grief-stricken condition if she forgot the matter of the beast in the forest entirely.

  ‘Why did Cleaver Square bring it back?’ Hunter asked.

  ‘There was a weapon,’ she said. ‘It was embedded in the woody flesh of the tree next to which it stood. It had been recently used, was bloody. Blood had frozen in dripping icicles from the spine of the blade. It looked like a cleaver. Though the butcher wielding this tool would have needed to be a giant to have done so, such were its monstrous dimensions.’

  ‘How can a wolf hold a cleaver when it doesn’t have a thumb?’

  ‘Wolves don’t stand upright either. You remember Judge Smith’s description?’

  ‘Neither wolf nor man but both in some horrid collusion of breed,’ Hunter quoted.

  ‘It wore leather gauntlets. The fingers were very long. It possessed hands, alright.’

  ‘How tall was the creature?’

  Elizabeth shivered. ‘It was perhaps seven feet. Perspective is difficult when you are as terrified as I was. But it was bigger than a man. Its mannishness was a masquerade, Mark. It was just its conceit. It was a monster. And it was feasting its eyes on me.’ Elizabeth put down her whisky glass emphatically on the table between them. ‘You know what we should do? We should see if we can find her on the internet. Party animals are not shy. And if she does not fear you—’

  ‘She doesn’t.’

  ‘She won’t be hiding, will she?’

  They did a Google search using the words Mallory, Cleaver, Square, Brooke, Berlin, Guerlain, Mahler and Magdalena. The first five pages to come up were a disparate waste of time. But then on page six there was a taster for a profile piece in an obscure style magazine of the sort generally more concerned with paper quality and page layout than journalistic accuracy. Hunter paid the online subscription with his credit card in order to access the entire piece. The words unfurled on the screen before them. He printed two copies out and they sat and read it in their opposing chairs.

  Style is not so much an aspiration to Lavinia Mallory as a prerequisite of existence. She is graceful by instinct, beautiful by genetic blessing and witty by gift of intellect. Her sense of humour inclines towards the sardonic and, meeting her, she seems far too frosty and detached for so purple an emotion as passion. But Lavinia is passionate; about poetry, history, symphonic music and even politics.

  ‘Christ,’ Hunter said aloud. ‘It’s her.’

  Elizabeth did not reply. She thought the tone of the piece nauseating. But she was engrossed just the same.

  The Mallory parties are affairs sufficiently exclusive for common gossip about them to be almost non-existent. Her guest lists include the glamorous, the privileged, the famous and, it must be confessed, the famously louche. Nothing of substance about what goes on at them emerges from the lips of those lucky enough to be granted one of her coveted invitations. That’s the deal when you reach those heights of social exclusivity and everyone who is anyone is aware of the fact. So there are no details in the public domain about what makes these long and extravagant celebrations so compulsively enjoyable. But everyone I spoke to about them agreed that Lavinia has achieved a social feat known to be scientifically impossible. She is both the hottest and the coolest hostess in town.

  Her soirées, by contrast, are as sober as her parties are bacchanalian. Here, the great and the good gather to discuss the themes and topics that the rest of us will find ourselves talking about eighteen months or so down the line. Here, some of our most influential thinkers, social strategists, industrialists and policy decision makers discuss and debate the tone and tenor of our challenging and sometimes turbulent times.

  Yet when I put it to Lavinia Mallory that she is one of the most influential women in London, she merely laughed her delicious, throaty laugh and dismissed the suggestion modestly. ‘I am here to enjoy myself,’ she said. ‘But I have never understood the threat implicit in the old Chinese curse. Personally, I have always preferred to live in interesting times.’ I asked why a woman of such obvious means had chosen to buy a house on the south side of the river. Her grey eyes seemed to grow slightly in her lovely head and I had the intuition for a moment that this would be a formidable woman to cross. Then she smiled her seductive smile at me and said, ‘I’ve always seen myself as a Left Bank sort of person. There is a lot of the bohemian in me.’

  And a fair bit of the nomad too. She has graced cities from New York to Barcelona with her intoxicating glamour. She was born in Salzburg thirty-seven years ago and grew up in Argentina. Her education was finished, in the traditional sense, in Switzerland. She speaks five languages fluently and still keeps an apartment in Berlin. She has made her mark since her arrival in London eighteen months ago. In that time she has become the Cleaver Square siren, irresistible to the people who matter, as they beat a willing path to her imposing door.

  The piece was bylined. Its writer was credited as Lucien Hope.

  ‘Lucien Hopeless,’ Hunter said, dropping the piece on to the floor in disgust. ‘I wonder if he thought to verify a single fact.’

  ‘I’ll bet there are pictures with the original piece,’ Elizabeth said. ‘We’ve got all the words here, but not the piece as it would have appeared in the magazine. This is not the actual layout. You can tell from the vacuous tone the sort of magazine it is. Pictures are going to be far more important to its star-struck readership than the written drivel accompanying them.’

  ‘This was published six weeks ago. But the magazine is quarterly and so it has a three-month shelf life. At least, in theory it does. It’s too esoteric to be the sort of thing that sells out. I’ll locate and buy a copy in Edinburgh,’ Hunter said.

  ‘You’ll do what?’

  ‘I’m going to take the train to London tomorrow and have a look for myself. It’s just reconnaissance, Elizabeth. I’m not going to try to take her on just yet. I’ll get the magazine and study the original piece on the way. We have to have a plan for dealing with Mrs Mallory. We’ll only get one opportunity and the plan cannot fail.’

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ she said. ‘My mother is fine about taking Adam. Or she could come here and keep an eye on him.’

  ‘No. It’s too dangerous.’

  ‘I thought you wanted my help.’

  ‘To be perfectly honest, I don’t think I am going to be able to do it without you,’ he said. ‘But we don’t move against her until we have a plan.’

  Elizabeth looked deep in thought.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Something Miss Hall said to you about your presence in Magdalena being nothing to do with chance. Something Andrew Cawdor said about the potential for the good of the world in Adam. What Mrs Mallory sai
d to you about her curse and what Adam said about her wanting to put a tilt on the world.’ She looked at him. ‘Be very careful, Mark.’

  ‘I will be.’

  ‘My mother can only patch you up so often.’

  ‘There won’t be any dogs. She couldn’t run the risk of them mauling her guests. And her guests would object to their stink.’

  ‘There’s the wolf thing.’

  ‘Adam said it was inanimate, in his dream. What about the thing you saw in Grozny? What do you think it wanted?’

  ‘At the time, I thought it wanted to hurt me. Now I think quite the opposite. And that’s a much scarier proposition.’

  Elizabeth got up and went over to the computer. She did a search for Lucien Hope. She found an obituary written for him. It was four weeks old. He had been a photographer, a fashion stylist and a writer. He had been a terrible journalist, but his intuition had been sound in fearing he had antagonised Mrs Mallory with his careless slight concerning her south London address. She would have been doubly irked, because he had repeated the insult in print. A further search revealed a short news story offering more specific and grisly detail. He certainly would have regretted his misjudgement, she thought, bleeding to death in the bathtub of his council flat after slitting his wrists. Perhaps he’d had a chip on his shoulder about his own postcode. His flat had been in Brixton. She switched off the computer. This was one sombre footnote she felt she could spare Mark Hunter. He had more than enough as it was to be concerned and depressed about.

  Adam took it very badly when his father broke it to him the following morning that he was going away again. He started to cry. He stood there in his pyjamas and his dressing gown and slippers in the kitchen and bawled, sobbing so hard that his shoulders shook. Elizabeth felt she ought to spare him the embarrassment of her witnessing this. But far from being embarrassed, it was to her he went for comfort, putting his arms around her, his hot little face burying itself in her stomach, reminding her that for all his precocious intelligence and the worldly confidence he affected he was at a very young and tender age. She slid down, kneeling so their heads were on a level, and hugged him. Hunter stood awkwardly with the table between himself and his son.

  ‘Tell him not to go,’ Adam said. ‘Tell him he can’t go. Please tell him, Elizabeth, he takes notice of you.’ He started sobbing again through the tears and snot. ‘Please,’ he said.

  Elizabeth reached for a paper napkin from the table and dabbed at his face, looking over his head towards his father.

  ‘Order him,’ Adam said. He sniffed. ‘You can do it, you’re a doctor.’

  Elizabeth smiled despite herself. ‘And your dad is a colonel.’

  ‘No. He’s a retired colonel.’

  ‘Elizabeth will stay with you,’ Hunter said.

  Adam turned to look at his father. ‘And I love Elizabeth. I do. But when you’re here, Dad, I feel safe.’

  Hunter walked round the table and took his son by the hand. ‘It’s only for a single night,’ he said. He ruffled Adam’s hair. He led him away into the sitting room and from the kitchen door Elizabeth saw him sit them both by the cold ashes of last night’s fire to comfort and reassure him and bring him round. In this, he was unsuccessful. She could see that by the abject look on Adam’s face at the window when his father drove the Land Rover away from the house through the snow an hour later at the start of his journey.

  Hunter found a copy of the magazine at a place in the Old Town that sold esoteric books and arts and fashion-based periodicals. He took it out of his bag to read it as the train left the station. There was a picture of Lucien Hope on the contributors’ page. He had styled the main fashion feature, as well as writing the sycophantic little assemblage of clichés and myths about Mrs Mallory. There was a fey look about his bleached blond hair and the hint of black eyeliner he wore. And there was an eagerness to please in his too-wide smile.

  The piece had been laid out across four pages. The opening spread comprised a single full-bleed picture with a slab of intro copy reversed out on the right side of the right-hand page. The title of the feature, described in an italicised font across the top of the opening spread, was the terrible pun, ‘Meet Cleaver’. Elizabeth had been right, though. Inept with words, the magazine knew what it was doing when it came to picture quality. The black and white portrait photograph of Mrs Mallory was back-lit using natural light filtered through two rectangular windows. Its subject sat, or more accurately lounged, on a large leather sofa. She was wearing a black dress made of some clingy fabric with a sheen that showed off her long legs and slim, supple curves. Her shoulders and arms were bare, smooth and firmly contoured. Smoke from a cigarette held poised in the fingers of her right hand rose in a languid spiral upward. She was bare-headed, looking straight at the camera. A choker of black pearls emphasised the elegant length of her neck; it was not there to disguise wrinkles. Mrs Mallory did not do wrinkles, Hunter knew. Just as she did not do frugality or exercise classes or social networking internet sites or coffee at Starbucks or supermarket shopping or political correctness in being mindful of not being photographed smoking. She was disdainful and apart. The practicalities of life did not afflict her and neither did its mundane and pedestrian values. I don’t care, the picture said. I really do not give a shit.

  She was very beautiful. Hunter had been trained to be objective and there was no other word adequate. She was sexy and she was glamorous and she was beautiful. She wore her hair longer now than she had at Magdalena. The added length should logically have aged her. But it had the effect of making her appear more youthful and feminine. It fell unconfined from a casual centre parting and its waves rippled blackly down to the top of her cleavage. Her eyes were grey and sparkling and sardonically amused. Her facial bones were coldly sculpted. But their perfection was offset subtly by the hint of warmth in the half-smile playing on Mrs Mallory’s succulent lips.

  ‘Kiss me,’ she had commanded Mark Hunter a dozen years ago. Those lips had parted as she spoke the words. And if you judged her only on this picture, it would seem an invitation wholly irresistible. He smiled to himself. He was almost alone in his carriage. It was the West Coast service and he had paid the ticket collector the upgrade to Weekend First. It was odd to think that the woman in this photograph had once looked like Lillian had, like Elizabeth Bancroft did. They were beautiful too. But she was self-invented. She had been long toiled over. And it was fair to say that Mrs Mallory had created, in herself, something of a masterpiece.

  Kate Hunter’s ballet tutor had been Miss Dupree. And Miss Dupree had been a piece of work. She had a light physique and pulled-back hair, and splayed feet when she stood on one hip in the repose of the stereotypical ballerina. But she had retired from performance at the end of the 1980s. The odd thing about her was that she seemed to be ageing in reverse. ‘She’s a work in progress,’ Lillian had said, laughing at what she considered her husband’s ludicrous naivety when he’d pointed this out. ‘There’s more Botox in her face than face, Mark. She’s had more lifts than most skyscrapers are equipped with.’

  Hunter asked his wife what Botox was and was given his reply. She told him about collagen and the other cosmetic alchemies that kept affluent women forever young-looking.

  And he looked at his wife, who had not visibly aged one single day since the one on which they had met. ‘Do you use this stuff, Lillian?’ he had asked.

  And she had laughed again. ‘There are easier ways,’ she said.

  ‘Easier?’

  ‘More natural, you might say.’

  Rosaline Dupree had not looked natural. But Mrs Mallory did. There was this tautness about everything above the jaw on the ballet teacher’s face that made it impossible for her features to register emotion. All the facial muscles need to do so had been frozen by the cosmetic toxin, Botox. But when Mark studied the magazine portrait of Mrs Mallory in pale November sunshine through the train window, she did not even look airbrushed. He smiled despite himself. No wonder poor, fat, cantankerou
s Miss Hall had always been so crabby about her.

  He turned the page. The second spread comprised a full-page ad for Shalimar perfume on the left and a full-page-bleed editorial photo on the right with more reversed-out copy. It was another interior shot and again it was black and white. Black predominated. But then, this was Mrs Mallory’s world.

  Nevertheless, Hunter thought the photographer had composed the image. She stood resting her right hand on the top of a Steinway concert grand piano. In the grip of her left fist were a bunch of white roses with their blooms pointed at the floor. Her eyes were downcast and petals lay in a pale cluster on the floorboards beneath the bouquet. She was smiling at some secret amusement and her lower lip had snagged slightly on her teeth. This imperfection made her look human and gorgeous. Lucien Hope, he assumed, had styled her for this shot. She wore a man’s three-piece evening suit. The trousers showed off the length of her legs and the tightly buttoned waistcoat how slender she was at the waist. It struck Hunter as a picture that could have been taken at any time over the last eighty years or so. A bronze bust rested on the piano and he recognised the florid handsomeness of its subject, Rupert Brooke. He remembered the opening lines from Brooke’s famous, prophetic poem.

  If I should die, think only this of me:

  That there’s some corner of a foreign field

  That is forever England.

  By way of the Russian Steppes and Berlin and Magdalena and who knew how many other places on her dark odyssey, Mrs Mallory had come to England. She was not English, though. And she had certainly not come to England to die. But Hunter was an Englishman and he had chosen to live in the white, winter wilderness of the Scottish Highlands. The lines of the poem filled him as he recalled them with a cold blossoming of dread. For reasons he could not have articulated, they made him think of Adam, his son.