For the moment Barbara felt nothing but sympathy. "Did you ever look inside the house?"
"I didn't dare to, in case someone had me arrested. People are like that, you'd be surprised. We could go in together, though, couldn't we? They'd have to believe you." ------------------------------------com90
She'd landed herself in that one, Barbara thought wryly. Still, it was easy enough to refuse, to plead pressures of work, and she was about to do so when a stray thought made her pause. Suppose the people Margery was searching for were the people who had kidnapped and killed Angela? Suppose the purpose of the two phone calls had been to alert Barbara to their existence, however obliquely? Suppose the caller hadn't dared to be more explicit? At least she might have a chance, however small and belated, to make amends for her neglect of Angela.
"All right," she said, not at all sure of herself or of how she was becoming involved, "I don't suppose it will do any harm. I'm busy today and tomorrow, but tomorrow evening is clear. I'll pick you up at your flat about sevenish."
"It's number eight, flat three. My name isn't on the bell. It doesn't do to let people know too much about yourself." She blackened her eyes with mascara as Barbara called for the bill. "Oh, let me pay half," she said, so mechanically as to leave no doubt that she hoped Barbara would refuse.
She made for the staircase as Barbara paid for them both. There she stumbled, almost pulling someone's coat from the back of his chair. She hurried upstairs, smiling apologetically. It seemed she had spoken freely because she was drunk, but Barbara wondered if she had left anything unsaid.
"If we don't find anything at the house," Margery said when Barbara caught up with her outside, "we could help Gerry Martin, couldn't we? Then there would be more of us to search. The only thing is, I couldn't pay for much traveling."
"We'll see what happens," Barbara said, for she felt she was being drawn deeper too quickly. She watched Margery vanish into the minor maze of side streets, then ------------------------------------com91
she made for Curzon Street. She must think of a plausible story to tell Louise, something that would save her from having to explain, for now that she thought about it she had little idea what she was doing, or why. ------------------------------------com92 ------------------------------------com93
93
Eleven
Margery sat on her bed and gazed from her window. Above the peeling bleached houses, the blue drained from the sky; somewhere nearby a man and a woman were shouting. Margery was reading a large novel about a brilliant young actress who used her talents to rob and seduce and blackmail her way into international society. It was a book for people who liked to imagine themselves in the role of criminal but who needed to believe that nothing of the kind could happen to them or perhaps to anyone else, and it was dedicated to the author's agent, Barbara Waugh.
Where was Barbara? To judge by the sky, she must be late by now. Margery leaned out of the window. The white houses hung like holey sheets above the gray pavements; the man had stopped shouting, the woman was screaming; two men strolled by, ignoring the screams. Margery liked ------------------------------------com94
people to mind their own business, but sometimes she felt that round here they did so too well.
She slipped the book under the bed with the others. She'd had enough of it, had enough of lies. Susan gazed down from the narrow shelf above the bed. The sun never reached her there, and she looked to be gazing out through fog rather than glass, up among the shadows or stains of damp which clung beneath the ceiling. If Margery switched on the light beneath its dusty fez the dark patches were still there, and Susan was wiped out by a slash of light on the glass.
Susan was holding a book of Picasso's work, which she'd chosen as a prize at school. Margery hadn't liked most of the paintings, which looked like things that vandals drew on walls, but then she'd never claimed to be artistic; if they helped Susan with her art, that was all that mattered.
If only she had kept along that path! Margery had tried to encourage her to do better, but Susan had scarcely worn the presents her mother brought home. Before she had left school she had begun to turn against everything that Margery wanted her to be. Too late Margery had seen that people were turning Susan against her, reminding Susan of her mother's mistakes. That was confirmed by the way so many people--the neighbors, the police--had been delighted when Susan left her.
And perhaps Barbara Waugh was among them. She'd seemed generous when she had drunk less than Margery, but perhaps the wine had been meant to make Margery overlook questions she ought to have asked. How could the agent have known so little about the people who had lived in the abandoned house, when she had known enough to trace her daughter Angela there? What had she meant by saying that Angela had been killed? Perhaps she had only been pretending to be sympathetic, so that Margery would let these things go unexplained. ------------------------------------com95
Today she had gone to the library to look up the article about Barbara Waugh, to see if it really said that Angela had been killed, but when she'd said she didn't know the date of publication the staff had treated her as if she couldn't read. They hadn't kept it, they told her without even checking. She was glad she'd stolen their copy of the book she had noticed in Barbara's office--they would never have let her borrow it--but it had given her no insight into Barbara Waugh. How could she be sure of the woman? Was she even coming?
The "Charlie's Angels" theme was blaring in the flat next door. In the days when she was allowed to rent a television, she had used to watch the Angels with faint contempt--they were so impeccable and fearless and unreal--yet part of her had wished she could deal with problems as capably as they did. Of course they didn't deal with real life, that was too messy and disappointing. They were reminding her how disappointing it was, for their theme meant that it was eight o'clock, that Barbara Waugh wasn't coming.
So the evening was wasted. If there was anything that needed to be found in the house by the overpass, it would stay hidden while they took Susan even further away. Everyone had been right after all: Margery was an apology for a mother, she could do nothing to save her child.
All at once she rallied. They'd nearly had her there, but she was the one person they couldn't turn against Margery Turner. They'd almost cowed her into becoming the person they all wanted her to think she was, but she wasn't so easily beaten, not while Susan was in danger. The market was closed now, there might be nobody to wonder what she was doing at the empty house. Let them have her arrested, she had Susan's second letter to show why she was there. She'd give as good an account of herself as Barbara Waugh could have. ------------------------------------com96
And by God, Barbara Waugh would have to help if necessary. She could vouch for Margery; after all, she'd trespassed at the house herself, if that was trespassing. Maybe she'd thought she had got rid of Margery by lying to her, but her behavior in front of her receptionist had shown she had something to hide; Margery could play on that if she had to. Smiling at herself in the mirror above the sink, where a jagged patch of wall pierced by a rusty screw left a piece out of the top of her head, she made up her eyes and went out.
Apart from the stampede of traffic on the overpass, the streets were quieter than during the day. Now that the light was subdued everything had the chance to be itself, and she was able to look directly at the white houses. She could see each line of mortar in the sharp-edged frieze of chimneys. As she walked past open windows, Charlie's Angels ran from house to house.
The Portobello Road seemed much wider now that the market had been put away. Window displays were quiet as museum cases, if more dusty. She halted beneath the overpass, amid litter which was dozing fitfully, and stared at the house beyond the bricked-up gate. She mustn't lose her nerve. Perhaps there was nothing to find in the house, but she would still have proved that she could face it by herself, she needn't rely on other people when they were all so unreliable. She stopped her mind at that and made herself emerge.
> The noise blotted out her thoughts at once. She'd walked some way before it became actually painful, otherwise she would have had to retreat. She felt as if the noise were in her head and bursting outward. She scrambled over the armchair that had broken the fence between the gardens and stumbled to the porch, to take refuge from the noise. She no longer cared if anyone was watching.
- She hesitated when she saw that the front door was ------------------------------------com97
closed; surely Barbara Waugh had left it wide open. But it opened readily, revealing a hall which led past a staircase to a kitchen. Through the kitchen doorway she could see a window, beyond which rubbish was smouldering. A door stood open on either side of the hall. The floor, the carpet that was too narrow and too short for the stairs, the stairs themselves, all were pale with dust.
When she stepped forward the noise accompanied her. Though she felt dust gritting underfoot, it seemed to make no sound. Glancing down, she saw her footprints following her. There were no marks in the dust ahead. Gratified that she was able to think despite the uproar, she closed the front door and hurried down the hall.
The kitchen was a mass of closed doors: wall cupboards, a battered refrigerator, a chipped stove wrenched away from the wall, its umbilicus dangling. The stove was empty, but there was an unidentifiably rotten object at the back of the refrigerator. When she managed to open the cupboards, their sliding doors grinding in dust, she found several jars that looked sticky with gray fur.
She went back to the hall. The noise was dull but omnipresent, a medium in which the house was drowning. She'd glanced into the rooms beside the hall on her way to the kitchen--rooms the length of the house, bare except for dust--which was why she faltered now, heart jumping painfully. But the gray lumpy mass just inside the righthand doorway was a tangle of cobwebs and dust or stuffing from a chair, not an animal at all. She dodged past it, into the room.
There was nowhere to search. Apart from a fireplace which had once been painted white, the room was absolutely featureless. Oily black ash came flaking toward her as she stooped quickly to the grate. She strode back into the hall, ignoring the flurry of the mass of cobwebs.
The room across the hall was empty. The sash of the ------------------------------------com98
back window lay broken on the floor. If the entire house was as bare as this, what point was there in searching? But she wouldn't know unless she looked. Why should she be afraid to go upstairs? It didn't matter that she would be further from the front door, not when the house was so obviously disused.
Nevertheless, as she climbed the stairs she felt that someone was standing absolutely still and watching her, she couldn't tell from where. It was the sort of thing anyone might feel in a deserted house. The smell of dust gathered in her nostrils, the air looked gray and dimmed and restless. Above the stairs a dangling socket swollen with brownish dust swayed almost imperceptibly.
All the doors on the first landing were open. The bathroom contained a dried-up toilet from which a spider was crawling; a coffin-shaped patch on the floor showed where the bath had used to be. Both of the larger rooms were completely bare. Tattered cobwebs hung from the ceilings, groped feebly over the walls.
She was glad not to have to linger in the rooms; she had been nervous when she couldn't see the stairs. But the only footprints climbing toward her were her own, and there were no prints on the staircase above her. She was beginning to feel irritable: could Barbara Waugh have tricked her into coming here alone to teach Margery not to pester her? She was only trying to dissuade herself from going up to the top floor; it was nervousness that was making her irritable. She glowered at nothing, as if that would scare away her nervousness, and hurried up the stairs.
They were darker than the rest of the house. The heat and the dust seemed to have massed up here, a dark oppressive presence beneath the roof. She took short quick breaths as she climbed, but her nostrils still felt clogged. Suddenly she recalled what she'd seen from outside the ------------------------------------com99
house: the left-hand window on the top floor was bricked up. No wonder it was dark. She hoped she wouldn't have to go into that room.
But of course she had to, even though she could see through the doorway that it was darker in there than it ought to be. The front window was bricked up, but why was there no light from the back? She glanced uneasily at the dim staircase--nothing but her footprints--then she made herself go into the room.
Beyond the doorway was a passage no wider than a telephone booth. At first she thought that was the cause of the dark, then she managed to distinguish the room itself beyond an open door at the end of the short passage. The room was even darker. She ventured forward, and realized why. Not only the front window but the back had been filled in.
She was reaching into the darkness in search of a light switch--if the Waugh bitch hadn't let her down she wouldn't be so fearful now--when the smell came drifting out at her. Though it was too faint for her to define, it was utterly horrible. For a moment she thought she was trapped, that the door to the landing would close, locking her in with the dark and the smell. Nobody would hear her screams. Then she had stumbled out onto the landing, and slammed the door so hard that the slam resounded through the omnipresent noise, down through the house.
Susan had lived in this house. Margery's dismay at that was so intense, if unspecific, that she was afraid she might be sick. It was her dismay that made her go into the last bare room, though she could see there was nothing to find. On impulse she glanced from the back window. Behind the house a bath was almost buried under a smouldering pile of rubbish that looked as though it came from all the houses. If there had been anything to find, perhaps it was in that pile. ------------------------------------100
She was hurrying back to the landing--she'd realized that if the door to the bricked-up room should open she would never hear it, though she wasn't sure why that should make her nervous--when a floorboard moved beneath her feet. Was the dilapidated floor giving way? She almost fell, and that was how she glimpsed the piece of paper beneath the dislodged board.
Her excitement faded when she saw what it was: a crumpled page torn out of a book, just like the pages she'd seen littering the garden below the porch. Nevertheless she fumbled the page from under the board and smoothed it out on the floor. It came from a book called The Bedroom Philosophers, and it described the torture of a mother. On the reverse was an illustration, but if it was as disgusting as the text, Margery didn't want to see--and yet wasn't it part of the life that Susan was leading? Reluctantly she turned over the page.
The drawing didn't illustrate the text. It was one of Susan's portraits. She read what Susan had scribbled beneath it, then she gazed at the sketched face. This was more than she could have hoped for. Barbara Waugh couldn't refuse to help her now.
Suddenly she was afraid. For no reason she was sure that she wasn't meant to take the drawing out of the house, that she had endangered herself by finding it at all. Every vague fear she had suffered since entering the house was lying in wait for her on the landing. She rushed herself out there, before she was too afraid to do so.
The door of the bricked-up room was still closed. She ran downstairs, frightened of her own clattering; she couldn't hear for the noise of the overpass, but suppose she could be heard? More than the heat and the dust seemed to loom about her now.
At the next landing she balked, staring. Her footprints in the dust led down, pretending that it would be easy for her ------------------------------------101
to retrace them--but they looked blurred, as though something had trailed over them. Perhaps a draft had blurred them or perhaps, she thought desperately, they had looked like that before. Time enough to wonder once she was out of the house.
She stumbled down to the half-landing, clutching the banister--a splinter stabbed deep into her palm--but there she had to stop. Her lungs were heaving; the dust seemed to have left no room in them for air. Only one more flight of stair
s, and she could already see the front door below her. But she could also see through the doorway where the mass of cobwebs had gathered or been left, and the mass of cobwebs was not there.
She didn't know what made her turn, crumpling the torn-out page in her hand: certainly not a noise. Of course a draft might have shifted the gray mass from the doorway, and perhaps a draft was making it, or something like it, come flopping down the stairs toward her. In the groundfloor room she had been reminded of an animal, but this looked hardly formed, a fetus covered with cobwebs and dust or composed of them. It was so quick that it had swarmed up her body and was almost at her face before she began to scream. ------------------------------------102 ------------------------------------103
103
Twelve
Barbaras car stalled before it had even left the parking lot under the Barbican. She used it so seldom in London that it had had several weeks to go wrong. She wouldn't have used it today, except that otherwise she would be late for her meeting with Margery. Now she couldn't even leave it, for it was blocking the ramp.
By the time she found someone to help her move it--a tweedy bespectacled man who had been looking at the remains of the medieval bastion and who seemed reluctant to go down the stairs with her--she had wasted ten minutes. When at last they'd maneuvered the car to a space in the herd of parked cars she was clammy and panting. She wiped her blackened hands on her jeans. At least she was dressed for exploring the dusty house.
She ran through the Barbican to the station. She'd said sevenish to Margery, but it was twenty-five to eight by ------------------------------------104
now. If only Margery were on the phone she could cancel the meeting; the day was already enough of a mess without this pointless expedition--but she had to see Margery in order to ask the question she should have thought to ask yesterday.
In the dark beyond the platform, trains were chasing their tails around the Circle line. They would take her to Notting Hill, but not to Ladbroke Grove; ought she to catch one and run the rest of the way? She was sure it would be ultimately quicker to take the Metropolitan, even though that meant she would have to wait on the empty platform and brood over the news about Paul Gregory.
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