At the end of the afternoon Debbie said, “Did you speak to the man, Miss Frayn?”
“Yes, Debbie, I did.” Her own smile took her by surprise, and grew.
When she reached Ringo she knew where she was going. She drove downtown. Small white clouds were scattered low on the blue sky, like elaborate shells. In the city centre, homebound cars were beginning to slow one another down; at last a driver let Clare slip through their ranks. She parked near the columns of the museum’s Corinthian portico. Past more columns, a semicircle standing forward from the rotunda of the Picton Reading Room, she hurried through the entrance to the libraries.
“Tally,” said a uniformed man behind a counter.
He was thrusting a cardboard rectangle at her. “Oh, thanks,” she said.
She was several steps away when he said, “Bag.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Your bag. You can’t take that in with you.”
“Oh, I see. All right then.” In exchange for the bag he gave her a plastic tab fitted with a rattling metal ring, but wouldn’t take back the cardboard tally. Released at last, she hurried away. A notice directed her to the fifth floor for Local History. A long-haired young man was emerging from the lift; she slipped past the closing door. The dull-green metal box, which felt crowded with her alone, creaked up to the fifth floor.
The Local History library was a long room full of tables; sunlight poured through portholes in the ceiling. A woman in her thirties came to the counter at once, smiling. “I’m trying to find someone’s address from about twenty years ago,” Clare said. “John Strong, his name is. Probably in Mulgrave Street.”
“Good heavens. Is there a John Strong revival?”
“I don’t think so,” Clare said, confused.
“How strange. It’s just that you’re the second person to ask for his address today. I won’t be a moment.” She returned with a bound volume of voters’ lists, and rapidly found the page. “John Strong. Twenty-one Amberley Street. That’s just off Mulgrave, or it was. I’ll be surprised if it’s still standing. Are you researching his book too?”
“That’s right.” In a moment she realized what they were talking about: if Edmund had read this book, whatever it was, so would she. “Have you a copy here?”
“There’s one down in Picton. It’s restricted, not on public access. But they’ll give it to you if you ask.”
She scribbled on a piece of paper. “Just fill in these details on one of their forms and you’ll have it in no time.”
133.0924 Strong: Glimpses of Absolute Power. “He used to come in here, you know,” the librarian said.
“What was he like?” Clare said eagerly.
“Well, I wasn’t here myself. Mr. Carrick is off today; he was here then. If you come in again you could ask him what he remembers, if you’re interested.”
“Yes, I might. What sort of thing, do you know?”
“Well—the trouble is, there’s no photograph of him on the book, and it sounds silly when you say it, but people used to say he had a horribly beautiful face. As if someone had put eyes inside a statue. Mr. Carrick does say he had the most perfect complexion he’s ever seen, and he never seemed to look any older. Of course he was getting older really; they could see him slowing down the last few times he came in here. But that thing about being horribly beautiful—there were people on the staff who couldn’t bear to look at him, really, couldn’t bear to be alone at the counter if he was here, even on a day like this. One girl used to say seeing him in daylight made it worse. As if someone had made a statue walk about and pretend to be alive. And yet his clothes were rags, more or less, as if they didn’t matter. I wish there were a photograph, don’t you?”
A man walked by outside the window. On the fifth floor—but he was an overalled workman on scaffolding. “I’ll tell you what Mr. Carrick told me,” the librarian said. “John Strong always used to talk to you at the counter, unless you got away. It was all rubbish—nobody could understand it, like his book. But Mr. Carrick used to have a feeling that the words didn’t matter; it was the way he said it, the sound of his voice, the cadences. Like a song hidden under the words. I remember, he said it reminded him of the music a snake-charmer plays. He always used to get rid of John Strong as soon as he could, and call away anyone who was listening. Sometimes Strong would talk to readers in the library and they’d go out with him. I expect they were friends of his, don’t you?”
All Clare thought, not quite soberly, was that he sounded even less like a John Strong. She hurried back to call the lift. A stringy man emerged from it. “Book lift,” he snapped.
“Pardon?”
“Book lift, book lift.” He rapped the words on the closing door with his knuckles: BOOK LIFT ONLY.
He was carrying no books. Nevertheless, she used the stairs, green stone speckled with darker green and white, like a pointillist painting. The Picton Reading Room was two floors down; at the top of the dome a round window spilled dazzling sunlight over the stone rim. Clare found a wad of forms in a pigeonhole among the catalogues that walled the curve. At the counter, a girl handed Clare’s completed form to a younger girl, who went away swinging a key to let out the book from the Henry Millers.
“I should watch out if I were you,” said an invisible man beside her.
It took her a while to locate him: whispering to a young librarian, a hundred feet away across the diameter. The dome was full of acoustic tricks. She gave in her tally for the book and carried it out beneath the dome; the echoes of her footsteps on the green carpet thumped distantly, like a heart.
She opened the book on one of the tables. The clack of its cover fluttered high in the dome; readers glanced up reprovingly—some of them did little else, glaring at the shrill of a telephone, frowning at the clank of footsteps on iron balconies around the dome, full of bookcases. They should sit elsewhere, Clare thought.
John Strong had published the book himself. Half the print was askew in the frame of the pages. The ink looked thick as paint; the p‘s and d‘s and others were stoppered with ink, as if the print were breaking out in crotchets. The gray paper was full of splinters. The book had been a fat pamphlet, bound later by the library. Glimpses of Absolute Power, set down and published by John Strong. Clare turned the page.
“I have undertaken this work late in life, for it was no part of my design. The truly great man confides his wisdom to a single pupil and companion, rather than publish it to the paws of the mass.
“But the truly great man is always at bay. Perhaps the mass may claim a petty victory in robbing me of my intended pupil; though it shall come to pass that my power rescinds that theft. Yet I shall set my knowledge down, in the certainty that it speaks to none save him who will dare to test it. Perhaps, among the mass that fumble over these pages, one may read who, glimpsing my way dimly, will set himself to follow.
“My age spans many generations. The loud incredulity of my beholders cannot shout down that calm truth. Of my birth I shall say nothing. Does a man reminisce fondly of the dung-smeared apes that were his forebears?”
God, was it all like this? Clare turned pages impatiently. To think he’d written this in the 1950’s. Incredible. Artistic skills come readily to the man whose aim is absolute power. She flipped through occult terms. The true relation of all things in the Universe— That caught her eye, but its context read like gabble. Sometimes, in its evolution, the Universe bears a mind that will grasp and wield its unity; such a mind is mine. Clare clucked her tongue. Tut tut tut, the dome said. Pages later, her gaze snagged on what looked like narrative.
“Once, on a whim, I allowed a few of them to pit themselves against my power. I displayed myself to them, engorged thick and stiffly raised as a club, and challenged them to move me. Some turned their eyes timidly aside, and shrank back when I granted them permission to touch me. Yet at the last all had worked upon me, upon themselves and upon each other, and lay exhausted while I stood laughing and unmoved. Some seemed cast down, and
perhaps they glimpsed themselves as I had seen them, grovelling upon the earth in their eagerness to please me. All understood my meaning well when I spoke of the wand of my power.”
So that was what it was all about; oh dear. Clare couldn’t see how his fantasies—surely they were only that—related to Christopher Kelly. There was no terror here; the book was just dull and repulsive. A cough reverberated under the dome, sharp as a blow.
“Before snuffing out the life she carried—”
That image plucked at Clare; she turned back. The paper rustled loudly, dryly, like an insect; its echoes rustled as she tried to hush it; it rustled.
“Before snuffing out the life she carried, it occurred to me to see her dance. I am sure even her fellows must have been amused, in their dull way. With her swollen belly she looked like nothing so much as a boil essaying the waltz.”
Clare stared about, to free herself of the book. The library looked distant, unnaturally bright; it offered her no support at all. Whispers drifted close around her; a cough clapped together like hands. Sounds nagged at her, insistent and intolerably sharp, as if she had fever. If what she’d just read was a fantasy, he had infected others with it; Dr. Miller had told it to George. The man had had the power to impose his nastiness on others, after all.
She riffled the pages, glancing warily. They fluttered dryly, rustling. She was searching only for references to Kelly. But images rose from the thick style as if swelling up from a marsh, dragging down her gaze.
“At first she pressed her lips together, and choked and sobbed. But shortly she was imitating her doll perfectly, and enjoying the sweetmeat as if it were drugged. One of her fellows puked and gazed at me in fear, knowing that her response had singled her out to be next.”
The words clung oppressively to her, like feverish heat. She made to turn to the previous page, to discover what the passage was about, then she shuddered and riffled on. Iron clanked, footsteps thumped softly, whispers sibilated.
“But she knew that nothing could take back her promise, not even death.”
Clare started. She was back in the flickering orange room; Mrs. Kelly was speaking almost the same words. Her heart thudded in her ears, cut off from the echoes. Get it over with. She read.
“—not even death. She knew that should she take her own life she would feel, beneath the ebbing of her spirit, the movements of the promised child within her, preparing to cheat her cheating and make its way to me.”
Clare glared before her. Bright sunlight and echoes. She could see the dying woman in the cave, could feel her engulfing terror as she remembered John Strong’s words. In a world where a man could believe he was achieving such horror, anything was possible. She could see the woman gazing down at herself in feeble helpless incredulity.
Abruptly she pushed back her chair. A suite of them clattered under the dome. She strode across the carpet, filling the dome with footsteps, and threw the book on the counter. “You should burn that,” she said. On the green stairs she had to close her eyes for a while, for the flecks of colour were crawling on the stone.
The porter gave back her bag in exchange for the plastic tab, but she’d left her tally in the Picton. “You can’t leave without handing in your tally,” he said.
“You just watch me.” When she reached Ringo she slowed, resting one hand on his hot roof. Should she abandon the search? She wanted no more of John Strong. But after all, his words were him; his house was only where he’d lived. It wasn’t as if it would be haunted; he’d died in his bed. Besides, it was an excuse to see Chris. Stupid, she thought: she’d no reason to be frightened of the house. After all, she would be with Chris.
At the Arts Centre Clare met the actress who had wanted to be invited to Chris’s flat. She was making a long-fanged green monster, man-size. Once she’d stared at Clare her eyes ignored her. Her footsteps resounded loudly on the floorboards, claiming them as her stage. No, Chris hadn’t been in today. No, she didn’t know where he was. Yes, she knew his address. Clare had to ask before she would release it.
Clare drove away down Mulgrave Street. It wasn’t worth feeling resentful. The girl had just been jealous. Clare and her kids could have made a better monster. When she reached Princes Avenue she realized that she must have driven past John Strong’s house, if it was still standing. Never mind, she’d save it for when she went with Chris.
She drove through a gap in the reservation and parked in North Hill Street, at the end of the alley behind Princes Road. Above the carriageway the lamps were dull hooks on the evening; beyond the ranks of trees Christ looked shrivelled.
Chris lived in one of the three-storey Georgian houses. The front lawn was ragged; chunks of brick crushed the grass. A girl in a kaftan emerged from the house as Clare reached it. “The fair-haired guy? I don’t think he’s in. Left on the first floor, if he is.” Clare looked for a bell-push, but it was missing from its plastic socket.
Next to the pay telephone on the hall wall was pinned a large advertisement for a taxi firm—friends of the landlady, no doubt. A skinny strip of thick green carpet trailed down the middle of the stairs; when Clare’s heels slipped from it they knocked on wood. Otherwise the house was silent.
She knocked at Chris’s door. She knocked again. Down the landing stood a dressing table, one of its drawers splintered outward like the coffin in that television film she hadn’t been able to switch off in time. She could just see herself in the oval mirror, struggling feebly beneath grime. As she knocked, something moved in the room—only the ghost of her knock. At last she walked downstairs, dispirited. Well, she’d tried.
She was cleaning Ringo’s offside window when she glanced up and saw the alley doorway.
The doorway from the backyard of the house into the alley was empty. Its rotten door lay beside it in pieces. Clare gazed from the doorway to the fire escape, climbing the back of the house outside Chris’s window. She stuffed her keys back in her bag and hurried into the alley.
Outside the doorway she halted, beside a crowd of fat plastic bags of garbage. She wasn’t really going to do it; it was silly. But she only wanted to look through his window. Suppose she were caught in the act! Then Chris would have to rescue her, tell them who she was. What romantic nonsense. All she wanted was to see his flat. She liked the way he hadn’t tried to entice her up there; it was part of his appeal. But now she wanted to see. She remembered the way the actress had stared at her. At once she strode into the yard.
It was full of dustbins, overflowing with garbage; she slithered on a piece of fish and almost knocked over the bins. The heat of the evening flooded her, thudding. She must be careful, even though she was sure the house was empty. The empty windows threatened to fill as she stepped carefully to the fire escape.
She tiptoed up. The iron creaked; the ground fell away through the mesh. At least Chris’s was the only window she would encounter. The bricks of the house wall jerked down in steps, close to her face. She reached Chris’s window and gasped.
She had thought he was being polite when he’d implied his flat was untidier than hers. But it looked like a burgled boutique. Clothes were heaped on the floor, an overturned mug had dribbled coffee on the floorboards, part of a newspaper poked out from beneath clothes, rolls of rug were unrolling near the walls. Oh, Chris, she thought. He really needed looking after. Men!
FOUND MUTILATED. That was all she could read of the newspaper. She frowned, peering, gripping the windowsill through the gap beneath the sash. The newspaper was yellowing. Why had he kept it? What did it say?
She was pondering when she realized what she was holding on to. The sash was ajar. She glanced about sharply. In the yard, dustbins glistened; opposite her above the yards, windows were blank. Chris wouldn’t mind; it was just that he’d never had the chance to invite her up. She only wanted to know what the newspaper said. She wanted to know. She raised the sash and climbed over the sill.
CAT FOUND MUTILATED. She should have known. No wonder she’d upset him. He was sensit
ive about his cat, after all. He had been trying to hide that. But it was morbid, keeping the newspaper. He needed a new companion, she thought, someone he could trust.
She glanced about the large room. Oh, what a mess. Next to an old record deck a pile of records had toppled, slipping from their sleeves. Several yellowing newspapers nested beneath the front window, beside a stolen DANGER sign. The bed—she couldn’t control her giggles—the sheets looked like a burrow Chris must slide out of in the mornings, a tunnel into darkness.
She muzzled her giggles with her hand. She was sure she’d heard a door open downstairs.
She imagined someone standing in the hall, staring up toward the giggling they’d heard. Her nose snorted painfully within her hand. Silence. Perhaps they were easing the door closed, to fool her. When she’d subsided she let go of her face, and saw what she had been staring at for minutes.
Over the end of the bed an old drab sweater and jeans were carefully laid. She frowned. She’d seen Chris wearing them. When he was acting? No, that had been the patchwork. She must be mistaken. It was just that they looked odd, laid there so carefully among the scattered clothes. She suppressed a giggle. He must wear them in the flat, to feel comfortable; that was why he treasured them. Just like a man.
She could tell that the wardrobe and couple of easy chairs came with the flat; the whole place felt second-hand. The green flowers of the wallpaper had nothing to do with Chris. A poster for Bonnie and Clyde was taped to one door of the wardrobe. Didn’t he keep anything in the wardrobe? There was a second lock on the door of the flat, and a chain. Although she’d sensed his vulnerability, she hadn’t realized he was so insecure.
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