by Lee, Tanith
‘Dark,’ said Sharon. ‘Mell-annic.’ She tasted the word, literally tasted it, a dark slab of chocolate cake in her watering mouth.
Wayne would come in with the smell on him of other women. He made no real secret of what he did. Cheap, nasty scent, and sometimes expensive, nasty scent. He wore each one like an additional piece of clothing. Slept beside her, reeking. Dreaming of them. He never made love to Sharon. If he ever had.
She thought of the cafeteria here, in Tesco’s, and how she had gone in and had a cream cake or a hot chocolate. Well, that was out. But they did do nice salads—not like the limp, wet, harsh things that were all she could conjure. Ham and coleslaw... that would not hurt. Not for once. And she could have a cup of tea with sugar. Who would know? And Andrew could eat something really exciting, a baked potato with cheese and beans. They deserved it, before the wait for the bus, and lugging the shopping up the road.
And then she turned and saw the cold case full of Weight Watchers meals, and all at once, in the desert, Sharon knew she was saved. Wayne could afford it. She would eat these. Look at them. Lasagne, spaghetti bolognaise—and so low in calories. Tesco’s had not let her down.
‘Just a minute, Andy,’ she said absently, ‘Mum won’t be long.’
And she reached in her hands and took up the packets of her salvation, and tossed them, with an unconscious swash-buckling grace, into her trolley.
She was generous. Sharon had been able, at last, to be friendly to Sharon.
When she turned round, she saw Andy over by the fruit pies, and she thought, gentle now, Yes, he’ll like that for tea. And she recalled the diet chocolate drink two aisles back.
But then she saw it was not, actually, Andy, but another child, older and not so interesting.
Sharon gazed about her.
Andrew was gone.
She felt a wave of irritation and then a long slow heave of panic. He was not a child who strayed.
She took hold of the trolley in a firm, business-like way, and marched up the aisle, and down another. And then up the second aisle and back into the first.
There were not many shoppers at this time of day, and few children, for it was not a school holiday.
Two small girls were playing with a woolly bear by the frozen peas, and Sharon asked them, ‘Have you seen a little boy, about your age, in a blue pullover?’
The mother of the girls came up.
‘Have you lost your boy? Oh, they are a nuisance.’
‘Yes,’ said Sharon.
Andrew was not a nuisance.
Andrew was her son.
Born from the sweet triumph of a starlit field.
Now she ran. And all at once she left her trolley, piled with the shining gold of hope, and empty-handed she raced, panting, up and down.
The banks of adored food passed like a glassy nightmare. The tints and shapes were wrong. Beauty had died.
Half an hour later Sharon found a woman in a tomato coat, one of the shop’s attendants.
The woman was efficient and concerned, seeing Sharon’s round fat face streaked with tears.
Over the Tannoy they alerted the shoppers to a missing child. A little boy in a blue jumper and jeans. Unfortunately, nobody seemed to have seen him. Not even the security cameras.
Later, they led her up into a sanctum of the store, and in a small warm room they brought her tea on a tray, and a plate of consolement, chocolate biscuits.
‘Don’t you worry, Mrs Ferris. The manager will call the police. It’s just a precaution. Little Andrew’s wandered off. They do, don’t they.’
These people were so kind to her.
But she was alone.
Sharon reached for the chocolate biscuits and fed them slowly and regularly into her weeping mouth. It seemed they would colour her crying. Chocolate tears.
And as the water rolled down her face and the chocolate entered the forbidden gate of her lips, in the heart of her soul she knew she would never see Andrew again.
Chapter Five
In July, Elizabeth and Reg went for two weeks holiday in Glasgow.
The house soon fell into a flowery bloom of dustiness, through which Rachaela, Althene, Anna and the cats picked their differing ways.
Fascinated, Rachaela noted how quickly the top of the cooker darkened from spilled olive oil, and the sink from washing-up left overnight. She was not inclined to chores. Once she had kept her various domiciles in order. But that was before the corruption of servants.
Finally, the night prior to Elizabeth’s return, Rachaela cleaned the kitchen. Althene did not ask her what she was doing. It was Anna who did that, Anna, just come from a conversation—in Dutch—with Althene. ‘But Elizabeth will be here tomorrow.’
‘I know,’ Rachaela said, ‘and it seemed unfair for her to come back to all this mess.’
‘What mess?’ said Anna.
‘Yes, so I’m mad,’ said Rachaela.
She did not look at Anna, and presently Anna went back to Althene. In the living room these two then watched a video of The Ten Commandments, a film Rachaela had once loved. But she did not want to watch it now. Her concentration flagged, as it did with music. She found she would stray into the room and turn on the TV. A habit had formed after the war, of watching the news. She did not know why she did this. She could and would help no one whose sufferings were brought so cruelly to light.
The cooker was not pristine, but she had done her best.
In the morning, Elizabeth and Reg were, unusually, late.
The day was hot and dull, the sun pushing over the house, deep shadow in the hall.
When the knocker sounded, Rachaela went to answer the door.
‘Here we are,’ said Elizabeth, and Reg silently saluted Rachaela, passing round the house to the mower shed. One of Elizabeth’s rare concessions to her heritage popped prettily from her mouth: ‘We’re a wee bit tardy. That old car. It’s got a mind of—’ Elizabeth halted. Something happened to her.
She did not lose her colour, and yet she turned to stone, and one stone hand went up to her lips.
Rachaela did not ask Elizabeth if she was ill, or what it was.
Rachaela merely turned, and beheld Anna, her daughter, passing through the steep shadow, from the kitchen to the living room.
Anna was dressed in one of the dresses Elizabeth had stitched for her. It was shorter now, only reaching a few inches below her knees, where it had trailed on the ground. It was perhaps also too tight. The dress was white and had a formless yet mediaeval air. Anna’s hair floated to her hips, and fluttered like smoke as she moved.
Behind her, Rachaela heard Elizabeth say, like a beldame on a blasted heath, ‘Awa’ wi ye, my fair, awa’ tae the hollo’ hill.’
Rachaela glanced at Elizabeth and said crisply, ‘That’s an old ballad, is it? Or a charm? Do you think she’ll go?’
‘I’m—sorry, Mrs Day,’ said Elizabeth. ‘She gave me a turn.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘I never realized—how she’s grown. It is Anna?’
‘Anna, say hallo to Elizabeth,’ Rachaela said.
But Anna, who was normally polite, and sensitive to the presence of others, did not seem to hear.
Yes, she looked like some fey ghost haunting a Scottish castle, one of those white maidens who flung themselves from battlements when deprived of love.
And from Anna’s right hand something dripped darkly, and made a shining trail along the floor...
‘Just a minute, Elizabeth, excuse me—’
Rachaela walked after Anna as the girl glided into the main room.
There the glow of day enveloped her.
She shimmered, and grew actual.
‘Anna!’
Anna turned. ‘Yes, Rachaela?’
‘What’s happened to your hand?’
Anna looked down and lifted her right hand, rather as Elizabeth had done, automatically, and opened her fingers. Out fell two dissolving ice-cubes. They had come from the fridge which, last night, Rachae
la had vigorously wiped with Jif.
‘What are you doing, Anna?’
‘I don’t know,’ Anna said. She appeared surprised but not dismayed. ‘I think I meant to get some orange juice.’
‘Then go and get it. Don’t be stupid.’
Anna gazed up at her. She was still not so tall that she need not do that.
But of course Elizabeth had baulked. She had seen Anna so often it had not properly struck her, but two weeks away were enough. And even in two weeks, doubtless, changes had gone on.
Anna was too old. Much too old.
And I hate her. It’s in my voice. My rival again. And this time I won’t even have twelve years before she catches me up.
In the hall, Elizabeth had hung up her summer jacket, and now she was in the kitchen.
‘My, isn’t it clean, Mrs Day.’
She was cheerful and at ease, and already the filter jug was bubbling for the coffee, and on a table lay fruit and flour, and a hand-written recipe for home-made ice-cream.
‘It must have startled you,’ said Rachaela.
‘Well,’ Elizabeth shrugged. ‘Just for a minute. But there. They shoot up now.’
‘Some of them do.’
‘What I said,’ said Elizabeth. ‘It’s an old fairy song. “The Elvinbrod”. The fairy people.’
‘The hollow hill,’ said Rachaela.
‘Tam kissed the Fairy Queen on the lips and went under the hill,’ said Elizabeth merrily, ‘and he was gone a day. But when he came out he was seven years older.’
‘That’s what she’s done, is it,’ said Rachaela. ‘Had a magic kiss.’
Elizabeth laughed.
Was she acting? Her eyes were open and innocent. But then, she and Reg must have known the Scarabae before this.
On the news that night there was a report of a little girl who had gone missing in Dyfed. She had been observed by friends cycling off into a disused railway tunnel, but she had never emerged on the far side. A fossil collector chipping away at the rocks there had not seen her, and though originally intensively questioned, the police had let him go.
There was something eerie as well as tragic in the story. Even the bicycle had disappeared.
‘Maybe she was sucked down into a hollow hill,’ Rachaela said, but Althene did not answer.
Althene held a letter in her hand. It had come that morning, with a Netherlands postmark.
‘I have had this,’ Althene said.
‘Yes.’
‘But you’re not concerned as to the content.’
‘It’s your business.’
‘If it’s my business, Rachaela, it may also be yours. Are you interested in me at all?’
Rachaela shrugged.
‘I think that we’ll need to talk,’ said Althene. ‘But first, I must warn you about this. I’ll have to go to Amsterdam. A few days only. I’m afraid I must go alone.’
‘All right.’
‘You don’t want to know why?’
‘It’s up to you.’
‘You are becoming,’ Althene said, ‘exasperating. You’re forming yourself into it, like a creature into a chrysalis. What will hatch?’
‘A beetle,’ said Rachaela. ‘A scarab.’
‘Very well. I must go back to see what Sofie—what my mother is doing. They say she’s behaving unwisely.’
‘They?’
‘The family.’
‘Your Scarabae. The Europeans. And they decide you have to go.’
‘Not precisely.’
‘Then why do it? You loathe your mother, don’t you? The bitch who beat you with a leather strap.’
‘I don’t love Sofie. I don’t like her. But I feel loyalty to her.’
‘Fathomless mystic Scarabae loyalty.’
Althene paused. She wore a dress the colour and nearly the texture of Sauterne, that left bare most of her hairless creamy lightly muscled arms, on the left of which hung one copper coil. She raised her head and the black jewellery of hair swung away.
‘We had these dialogues,’ she said, ‘in the beginning.’
‘But this,’ said Rachaela, ‘is another beginning.’
‘Is it?’
‘Your beginning with Anna.’
‘I see. Anna is my daughter.’
‘And what else?’
‘No,’ Althene said, ‘we will discuss this when I’ve come back.’
‘Will we.’
‘Adamus,’ Althene said, ‘is dead.’
‘Is he? Is Ruth dead?’
Althene said, ‘Please, Rachaela. I have to attend to this other matter. My mother, you see, is unhinged.’
‘And did you do that for her?’
Althene’s black eyes with their blue rings—they flashed. She could kill as well as kiss. The magic kiss. What was she to Anna? Had Anna ever questioned? Father—mother—lover... not yet.
‘As with your own mother,’ Althene said quietly, ‘she was driven mad by the attentions of my father.’
‘He loved her and left her.’
‘Substantially. Rather worse than that.’
‘What did he do?’
‘Something. I don’t know. He got me on her. Isn’t that enough.’
Rachaela said, ‘I don’t think so.’
‘And now you are intrigued. Well, I’ll tell you a story of my father, what I know of him. I saw him only once. Long ago.’
‘How long? Was this in the fourteen hundreds perhaps? Earlier?’
Althene grimaced. She said, ‘Suffice it to say our dresses swept the floor.’
‘All right.’
‘It was in the city, in Amsterdam. At the old house. I was playing in a lower room—’
‘Describe it to me.’
‘Why? It was a quite ordinary rich house. The floor had black diamonds on white. There was a tree, a hybrid orange in a pot, which had grown up through the ceiling. It would produce hard green inedible fruit like lime-green boiled sweets. I was about twelve, playing with a kitten, and he came in. This man.’
‘And how were you dressed, Althene? As a boy or as a girl?’
‘You’re perceptive.’
‘No, you said dresses sweeping the floor.’
‘Yes, then, I would bribe a maid to assist me. I would dress as a woman.’
‘How were you dressed?’
‘A little cap on my head and my hair down my back. Folded cloth over my breasts, which of course did not exist. A tight waist.’
‘And he saw you.’
‘Yes, he saw me. He looked tall to me, and then—then he must have been. Quite tall. He had jet black hair that fell, straight as a pen stroke, back from his face. A broad, high forehead. Blue eyes like jewels. He had a beautiful, goodly face. And he smiled. He didn’t know my name, but he called to me and I went to him.’
‘And this was your father.’
‘The man who got me on Sofie, yes.’
‘He was, naturally, Scarabae.’
‘Naturally. He asked what my name was. I had another name I would use, a secret name. But I told him. Out of every pore of him there breathed a kind of aroma. It was danger and darkness.’
Rachaela bowed her head. ‘I know.’
‘Of course you do. But Adamus, to this man, was like a whisper to a battle song.’
‘And Malach?’ Rachaela suddenly said. ‘What comparison would you make with Malach?’
‘Oh, Malach,’ Althene smiled. ‘Malach is Malach.’
‘Go on. What did your father do?’
‘He petted me. Very civilly, decorously. He told me I was very beautiful and that he had heard of me, and that I must be his daughter. He called himself Cajanus. He asked my age. He stroked my face. And my mother came down the stair and she howled. Like a dog. It frightened me, but he only stood up. And he put me behind him, as if to protect me, and I had in that moment a fantasy that he would take me away and all manner of things would be well.’
‘But he didn’t.’
‘Obviously not. My mother took him aside. They went up
stairs. He turned and kissed his hand to me as he climbed up. The light of the windows caught in his eyes. Evidently, I’ve never forgotten.’
Rachaela thought, Don’t try and win me now by your pain. Althene alarmed her, as at the start. Althene, it seemed, could always win.
‘And your mother told your father you were not a delicious tender nubile little girl, but a beastly perverted little boy.’
‘Oh, she did better than that.’
Althene looked into distance. How many centuries? The scene she had described, like a fantasy upon a Dutch painting, the floor, the kitten, the corrupted orange tree.
‘What?’
‘She had me brought, and shut the chamber door on us. The three of us. And then she stripped me with her bare hands. Quickly I was naked in front of him and he saw his mistake. I suppose he may have been embarrassed. His face closed like an eye. He was blind. He went straight out, but he had already left us. She laughed, and then she beat me.’
‘You said she was excellent at that.’
‘I’ve told you the story.’
Rachaela turned her head. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Yes, I’ve never elsewhere had such shame. Never since. And never before. It was a baptism. But he.’
They sat in silence, and down below Anna had turned on the music centre and Shostakovich rose up through the house, the perfect music cue in the film of life.
‘Do you have to go?’ Rachaela said.
‘If only to make you miss me, like before.’
‘And Anna,’ Rachaela said.
‘You’ll take care of Anna. Anna will be safe with you.’
‘I may strip her naked and whip her.’
‘You may learn to love her.’
‘She isn’t loveable. Not that way. Not as a mother’s daughter.’
‘How would you know?’ Althene said, and her face was colder than a closing eye, farther away than Amsterdam.
A new car had been bought for Reg. Rachaela found out when Elizabeth thanked her. The Scarabae must have seen to it. It was a smooth, dark grey Citroen XM.
In this vehicle, a few days later, Althene was borne to the airport. Anna, but not Rachaela, went with her. And, in the evening, Reg drove Anna home, and as the Citroen purred away into the afterglow, Anna pushed the buttons on the door, and stepped into the house, alone.