by Barbara Vine
She went upstairs. The children had gone and there was a smell of cigarette smoke. She opened the door of Five. It was exactly as it had been that morning. The unmade bed, the tumbled bedclothes, recalled to her the many hours she had spent lying there, waiting for Axel. She lay down on it now, realizing with something like a feeling of comfort, that this was the only place for her to be, the only place to wait. She told herself she must have more faith. He had invited her to go with him, she must cling to that.
When she woke it was dark. She got up and looked out of the window. A silver-segmented worm of a train was running down from West Hampstead to Finchley Road. Three people, all women, were crossing the bridge, three black silhouettes between the Lego struts. She pulled down the blind. The room was just as it had been, the two cases open on the floor, the cameras on the table, Thus Spake Zarathustra by the bed. She looked at the place he had reached, only a few pages into the book, and read: I teach you the Superman. Man is a thing to be surpassed.
It was hours since she had eaten or drunk anything. She began to go down and stopped on the fourth stair when she saw Tom waiting for her at the bottom.
‘He won't come back.’
She did not have to ask whom he meant. It was plain. Everything was plain and clear in his wounded face.
‘Why has he left his things then?’
Slyness changed his expression. He hesitated, but only for a moment. ‘He doesn't need them where he's gone. They'll be safe here for a year.’
‘I don't believe you.’
‘Come in here.’
He opened the door of Four and, when she tentatively approached, took her by the arm and pulled her inside. She stood rubbing her arm where he had hurt her. There was a bottle of wine on the table, cheap red wine from which about half had already been drunk. She knew what was coming, or had some idea, and she filled the glass he had already drunk from and drank it down.
‘I know about you and him,’ Tom said. ‘He doesn't care for you, not a bit, not the way I did. He told me to tell you he's gone, he's gone –’ she noticed the tiny hesitation while he improvised ‘– abroad. You won't see him again.’ He watched her, looking for signs which did not appear. She was quite still and impassive. ‘When I found out,’ he said, ‘I thought it would be all right after he'd gone, but it's not. It's all over. You're all over.’ He turned his head a little, not looking at her. ‘You're all over for me, loving you. I don't care any more, it's spoilt.’
He spoke like a child. He sounded younger than Jasper.
‘I don't want to see you again.’
‘That's all right,’ she said. ‘I don't want to see you.’
‘You haven't a chance with him, I just want you to know that.’
She said again, ‘I don't believe you,’ and she did not. Axel would not have confided these things in Tom. It was a ploy to punish her for her infidelity. She suddenly saw how absurd she was being, assuming the worst because Axel had not yet returned from wherever he had been. He would come tomorrow – only she had to get through till tomorrow.
The risk that he would not let her out of the room had to be taken. He had that look on his face it wore when he was about to break something. She felt dazed. The wine she had drunk on an empty stomach had gone straight to her head. She opened the door under his staring eyes, walked out, closed it behind her. He did nothing.
The empty feeling which came as she was halfway to the kitchen was unconnected with hunger or the wine. It was a draining of the spirit. Everything seemed to be falling away, every prop, hope, comfort, and what would remain was something very small and naked and vulnerable. There would be Axel. She held on to that. In the fridge she found some salami, some tomatoes, in a biscuit tin a newly opened pack of crispbread. Her hunger had gone but she ate some of the crispbread dry and a tomato with it.
Afterwards, she was half afraid to go up again in case Tom waylaid her, did her some violence. Perhaps from breaking plates it was only one more step to breaking people. She went past his door very quietly, holding her breath. In Five she thought that the next thing to happen would be that he would come up here. She turned the key in the lock, fell on her knees and began searching Axel's luggage.
In the first case, under his clothes, T-shirts, socks, briefs, was a photograph of a girl in a frame. It was a studio portrait and the frame was silver, badly tarnished. The girl looked like the girl in the picture on the wall. The photograph was in black and white, so you could not see if her hair was red or dark. The long white neck was swanlike, the expression in the large eyes apprehensive. In one corner in a bold hand was written: To Axel with all my love, Alice.
The blood came rushing up into Alice's face. They shared a name, she and this girl. She remembered things, how when they first met he had lingered over her name. Pressing cold hands to her hot face, she thought of this beautiful girl, that he might be with her now. She went on searching, feverishly now. Inside a box labelled Diazonium Supports, Instant Access Systems she found bundles of letters. Alice, though sick and gasping with jealousy, did not think anything had happened to warrant her reading Axel's letters. If he has not come back by tomorrow I will read them, she thought. Under the letters was a colour print torn from a magazine. It was a reproduction of a painting, though not the one up on the wall. A line of print under it said: Edward Burne-Jones, The Beguiling of Merlin (model: Mary Zambaco).
The girl in the painting was looking down on a recumbent man in black robes. She was inordinately tall with disproportionately long legs, long hands and a very small head. A semi-transparent gown clung to her body. Snakes writhed through her hair. Alice found this picture very disturbing; she turned it face-downwards, put the photograph frame on top of it and closed the lid of the case. She found she was breathing shallowly, as if she had had a shock.
There was nothing but books in the second case, and not many of those. Or so she thought at first. The book she opened was a volume of Skrebenski portraits, having had a flash of certainty that she would find the girl inside. In a way she was there but not printed on a page. A photograph lay between the endpapers.
It was of Axel and the girl together, a clean-shaven Axel a few years younger. They were in a garden where there was topiary and stonework, and they leant against a stone balustrade with cypresses behind. Alice gasped because they were so much alike, they had the same pale oval faces, large dark cautious eyes, red mouths, high foreheads. Both were tall and thin, the girl only a few inches shorter than Axel. On her hand, that rested on Axel's shoulder, was the ring he now wore. Alice turned the photograph over, though by now she hardly needed to read what was written on the reverse: The twins in the garden at Temple Stephen. The hand which had written those words had been elderly and shaky, a parent's or, more likely, grandparent's.
So she was only his sister. The relief of it was like a glass of water to someone feverish with thirst. She was liberated from jealousy and felt at once light and almost carefree. Might the dress also be his sister's? She opened the cupboard and looked at it, gleaming there in the dark recesses. Perhaps he had bought it as a present for this girl. Alice found she did not mind how much Axel loved his sister, his sister Alice.
This time she investigated the rest of the cupboard. The dark sweater was gone, he must be wearing it. In its place, pushed along to the extreme lefthand side of the rail, was his long black overcoat with the long black scarf draped over it. Under the hem of it, on the floor of the cupboard in the far corner, was another large, square package, like the one inside the suitcase but contained inside a bag of clear plastic.
Back in her Bluebeard's wife role, but curious now rather than jealous and fearful of what she might find, Alice scrutinized this package. She lifted it out of the plastic bag, loosened one corner of the brown paper, then the seam along the top, managing to unwrap it without tearing the paper. Inside was nothing but a cardboard box, labelled Magnesium Flash, highly flammable, handle with care. It was only another container for a substance used in photography, the
contents long used up and the box now a repository for more letters.
This was the first object in the room that she had actually interfered with. Everything in the cases she had taken care to replace exactly as they were. She was sure Axel would know someone had touched the stuff in the cupboard. She began searching the room, opening drawers. Inside one she found a roll of Sellotape. She re-packed the box and taped it, making a package precisely as it had been before, and replaced it in the plastic bag.
For the first time she was aware of a strong smell of petrol in the room. She could not tell if it was new or had always been there. It seemed to reach through her mouth and nostrils to bring pain to her head, and made the temptation to stay all night in there less insistent.
He would be back during the night. She went downstairs to the Headmaster's Study, took off her clothes and got into bed. She could see her violin in its case and she squeezed her eyes tight shut. When the bed lamp was off she opened her eyes into the dark and the violin had disappeared. The sight of it now always made her wince, made her feel bruised. Music was to be amputated from her life and Axel would have to replace it.
It was not yet ten and she was sure she would not sleep but she did not know what else to do. There was silence from the room next door, as if Tom had gone out. Lying there in the dark, listening to the trains passing, resolving at any moment to get up, put her coat on and go down to ask Tina if she had any sleeping pills, she fell into a profound, heavy sleep.
Cecilia slept most of the time. The doctor said it was the best thing for her, then that she would try to get her a hospital bed, it was too much for Daphne. The children no longer came. That was too much for Cecilia.
She still liked watching the news, propped up on pillows, her dead hand in Daphne's hand. Together they looked at the film of subterranean caverns, pitted and pock-marked by blast, a room full of control panels not too badly damaged. There were stains on the cavern floors that looked as if they might have been made by flying blood, but Daphne said it was only oil.
Repairs were under way and trains would be running normally through Holborn by tomorrow. The bomber had not been identified. The newscaster gave an impression of caginess and caution when he talked about it. The way he spoke made them not want to know more. Another bit of film came on and this time Cecilia said, in her thick mumble that only Daphne could interpret, that some of the stuff on the floor looked like hair.
‘Just fibres,’ said Daphne. ‘Like rope, you know, or coconut matting.’
Neither could imagine why there should be coconut matting in the Underground.
The IRA had said they did not do it.
‘They've never done that before, have they?’ Cecilia asked.
‘I don't think so, but they may have done; I'm not an inveterate news-watcher like you, Cessie.’
‘You know I shall have to go into hospital when they find me a bed, don't you?’
Daphne said if they did it would be over her dead body.
Alice slept all night. Just before she woke up – or she thought it was just before she woke up – she dreamed that Axel had come back and broken her violin. He snapped the bow across his knees and destroyed the instrument with a hammer. She watched without trying to stop him.
This dream was succeeded by a series of half-comprehended impressions, some known to be real, others in the area of dream or fantasy, as she dipped again into sleep and again surfaced. Footsteps moved about overhead, then ceased, sounded as if someone were dancing, then became normal footfalls. She awoke to silence, then to the sound of a train running past, and wondered if all of it had been unreal.
It took a few moments before she understood the footsteps meant Axel was back.
Had she heard them a minute ago or an hour ago or during the darkness of the night? She listened, heard nothing now. If this had been Mike or Tom, she would have waited for them to come to her. With Axel she could not wait, except to make herself presentable. She was not jealous of his sister, but his sister had been beautiful, comparisons must be made. She combed her hair, washed her face and, staring at herself in the glass, thought how worn she looked for twenty-four, how tired.
It was quite late, after ten. She went upstairs, confident she would find him stretched out on the bed. She was so sure that she knocked on the door. After a while she opened it, surprised that she could, that it was not locked.
He had been back. The cases were gone. His cameras were gone. She put her hand over her mouth to stop herself crying out. The cupboard doors were open and the contents gone, the white dress gone.
There must be a note, there must be something for her. She looked round the bare empty room, at the open cupboard, the unmade bed, the pale, blank sky outside the window, the walls. Mary Zambaco gazed back at her, with that fey, mysterious stare.
Axel was not the kind to write notes, farewell or explanatory letters. Somehow she knew this, without evidence for it. She thought, he came here to do something, something to do with his sister, and he has done it, accomplished it, whatever it was, and gone. It had nothing to do with me, I was incidental, a step along the path perhaps, part of a means to an end. That was all.
She closed the door and began to go downstairs. She was experiencing something very frightening, and experiencing it for the first time in her life. Time had stopped and there was nothing ahead of her. Medieval people believed that you could reach the end of the world, which was a cliff edge. If you took another step you fell off into space, into chaos. It was not quite like that that she felt, for a falling off, a plunge into chaos, would be welcome. Rather, she was unable to do anything because there was nothing to do, nothing ahead, even to sit alone with her thoughts was impossible, for she had no thoughts. The feeling extended to physical things, paralysing her, so that walking down these stairs was like wading through mud, a hard task, to be thought out and concentrated on; putting her hands up to her head was like lifting weights.
Tom had gone and her music and now Axel was gone. The only possession she had ever had which was truly hers, her baby, she had left. But when she thought of that, shutters in her mind closed, slid across each other, blanked and cut off the images. A blankness took over and the screen was wiped clean.
The phone rang. Not anticipating Axel, not anticipating anyone, she lifted the receiver. A woman. Alice heard the woman's voice bleating away, asking questions, uttering exclamatory remarks, had reached the point of hearing it asking why she didn't speak, before she realized it was her mother.
She said, ‘I'm sorry,’ and then, ‘I'm still here.’
‘It's just that I thought you'd like to know Shelley has moved in with Mike. It seemed the best thing, so now they can have Catherine back from Julia.’
It took her a moment to adjust to these names, to understand who these people were. She heard her mother extolling this Shelley's virtues, what a good housewife she was, a cordon bleu cook, and with some kind of nursery nursing diploma. Catherine adored her. Had her mother told Alice Catherine was walking now?
Alice said in a voice that sounded like someone else's, like the voice of a man with a cold, ‘You owe me £1,000.’
‘What? What did you say?’
‘You bet me £1,000 I'd never get into any orchestra. Well, I never shall now. That's all. It's over.’
Her mother gave a little dry laugh. ‘You mean you owe me. What's the matter with you? I was going to give you that money when you succeeded, not when you failed, thank you very much.’
Alice put the receiver down gently. The phone rang again almost at once. She did not think there was anyone else in the house, except perhaps the hawk on its own. Tom had gone out to play. At another time she would have smiled at this form of words but she did not smile. While she was coming downstairs, though it had not much registered at the time, she had seen Tina and the children going out by the front door.
She let the phone ring. She would never speak to her mother again. Perhaps she would never speak to anyone again, it seemed likely. H
e had come back in the night, in the small hours, and taken his things and gone.
She would have thought, five minutes before, that such a thing as hope was gone for ever. But hope came like a tiny beckoning finger, a child's finger. Tom had said so many things about Axel, about her and Axel, as if he knew everything. Suppose he had taken Axel's things himself, hidden them, to sustain a fantasy about his departure. Alice began exploring all the empty rooms in the house, starting on the top floor. The Science Lab first, then the Art Room, down to the Handwork Room, the Staff Common Room, down to Remove. She had come close up to the cloakroom door. This door she had passed a hundred times without curiosity, without the inclination to open it.
It would be like Tom to hide Axel's things in here. To punish her, to make her feel as she did feel. She opened the door to the cloakroom. It was not empty, there were cushions on the floor and bedding and an empty Coke can, but Axel's suitcases were not there. She did not feel disappointment, only a fleeting speculation as to how she might have felt if they had been.
Down from an aperture in the ceiling hung a rope. It hung in the centre of the room to within six inches of the floor. A vague memory came to Alice of hearing how some old man had hanged himself in here. She had heard hanging called a quick death. If she saw no future, only the edge of the precipice in front of her, had no conception of what to do next, how even to fill an hour, perhaps it was because there was nothing to come, that she had been led here for this moment, this finality.
She took the rope carefully in her hand. She touched it gingerly, as if it were alive, might slither from the ceiling and a head appear to bite her. It lay lightly across her palm. Surely it must be easy to make a noose, for all sorts of people did it, they hanged themselves by far less effective means, with belts and scarves and shoelaces. Some kind authority had brought her here and put this rope, these means, into her hands.