For a moment he stared at me, his eyes blank, then he nodded and took the lantern.
‘So…it’s done,’ he said softly. ‘It’s really done.’
Oddly enough, he sounded more lucid than he had been all night: his voice was clear and almost indifferent.
‘You will remember what to do next, won’t you?’ I urged, wary of Henry’s new serenity. ‘The presents. The tree. The housekeeper. Everything has to be perfectly normal.’ I was uncomfortably aware that if I had really killed Effie, we were risking my neck as well as his.
‘Of course.’ His tone was almost arrogant. He half turned away, and I was struck by the peculiar thought that I was being dismissed. At that thought I grinned, and suddenly I found myself laughing, choking with sour hilarity among the graves, the sound absurdly appropriate to that Gothic night as the heavy snowflakes filled my mouth, my eyes, my hair. And Henry Chester began to move slowly down the path, the lantern held high, like some stern Apostle leading the dead along the road to hell.
50
For a time beyond time there was nothing. I was beyond motion; beyond thought, beyond dreams. Then the world began to return; single thoughts drifted through my mind like isolated notes of an unfinished symphony. I moved through clouds of memory in search of myself until suddenly a face floated in front of me like a balloon and I remembered a name…then another…and another, fluttering around me in the haze like a hand of spilled cards. Fanny…Henry…Mose…
But where was she, my dark sister? My fellow-dreamer, my twin, my closest friend? In rising panic I looked around for her and realized that, for the first time since we met and travelled together, I was alone; alone and in darkness. A wave of memory broke upon my head and I cried out in dismay: my voice echoed oddly against frozen stone and, in the aftermath of the black wave, I realized where I was. I tried to move, but my body was stone, my hands frozen clay. As I forced my rigid limbs into movement, I found that I could raise myself on to my elbows. Painfully I began to search the area immediately around me, my eyes dilated against the endless dark. I was lying on some kind of ledge—my numb hands could not tell me whether it was of wood or stone, but I could tell that it ended a few inches to the left of me. What was beyond it I could not guess, preferring to stay quite still where I was rather than risk touching the rotting boards of some ancient coffin…Above me I could faintly hear the sounds of the night and the high whine of the wind.
Thinking of the outside I was for a moment disorientated, imagining myself deep under the ground with the roots of the cedars all around me. Tomorrow there would be people walking down the snowy path to church; children in bright coats and hats dreaming of sledging down Highgate Hill; lovers arm-in-arm, blinded by the sun on the snow; carol-singers with lanterns and hymn-books…and all the time I would be there beneath them, frozen into the dark stone with the dead around me…
At the thought I started and cried out involuntarily: No! Mose would come. I was supposed to wait, and he would come to find me. The realization flooded me with a great relief. For a moment I had been so confused that I had believed I was already dead, imprisoned for ever beneath the snow and the marble.
And in the warmth of that relief I slipped quietly out of my body again and out into the light where my sister was already waiting for me.
51
As I watched Henry disappear along the High Street I paused to look at my watch. It was two in the morning, technically Christmas Eve. I was drenched and, now that I was no longer carrying Effie, I had begun to feel the cold. I decided to give Henry half an hour or so to arrive home—it wouldn’t do to have him walk in on me as I opened up the grave—and began the walk half a mile or so down the road to an old haunt of mine, whose owner had a healthy disrespect for closing-times and where I might be able to catch a quick drink or two to warm that grim night. If I was going to open up that vault again alone I was going to do it with a few drinks inside me.
I know what you’re thinking and in a way you’re right. You see, a thought had come to me as I laid Effie’s lifeless body on the shelf in the vault, a thought I felt I should examine in a less morbid setting. So far I had been thinking only in terms of deceiving Henry into believing Effie was dead; neither Fanny nor I had really thought beyond that. No-one had ever wondered what would become of Effie, invalid that she was, when the charade was over. Now I realized that she would very likely need medical treatment—perhaps hospitalization. She would need a place to stay where she would not be recognized, for if word came to Henry that she was still alive it would not only mean the end of our lucrative plan but very likely arrest. In truth, everything pointed to the fact that Effie…
It was only a thought. A man can think, can’t he? And anyway…I swear I would never have thought of it if I hadn’t half believed she was already dead. Don’t think I didn’t feel a pang for my poor little Effie; I was very fond of her, you know. But you have to admit that her death would have been very convenient for all of us. Almost as if it had been meant, somehow. And so poetic, don’t you think? Like Juliet in the tomb.
52
Silence shrouded me as I made my way slowly back to Cromwell Square; an immense silence like death. Effie’s pitiless eyes had purged me of all thought and I walked mindlessly through the blank, drifting snow.
Stubbornly, I tried to force myself to suffer: I told myself brutally that I had murdered Effie; imagined her, still alive, inside the vault; waking, screaming, crying, scraping her fingers to bloody bone as she struggled to escape…but my most lurid imaginings failed to rouse the slightest shiver or the smallest stab of remorse. Nothing. And as I walked home I became aware of a kind of resonance in my mind, which gradually resolved itself into a single joyful, one-note anthem vibrating against my eardrum in time to the cadence of my heart: Marta, my black mass; my requiem; my danse macabre. I could feel her calling me through the night, wanting me, wanting my soul, her voice inaudible but close, intimate…
I reached my house and she was already there: her black cloak drawn around her so that I could only see the pale oval of her face as she beckoned me in, wordlessly. Without even stopping to light the lamps I reached for her. Why she had come; how she had entered the house were questions which did not even occur to me: enough to take her in my arms—how light she was, almost insubstantial through the heavy woollen folds of the cloak!—to bury my face in her hair and smell the acrid scent of the night on her skin: something like jasmine and lilac and chocolate…
My lips were burning against hers, but her flesh was searing cold; her fingers traced spirals of cold fire on my skin as she undressed me. She whispered in my ear, and her voice was like the whispering of the cypresses in Highgate cemetery. She slipped the cloak from her shoulders and I realized she was naked beneath it, ghostly in the greenish darkness, with the light from the snow reflected back on to her livid skin…but she was so beautiful for all that.
‘Oh Marta, what I have done for you…what I would do for you…’
When it was over, I remember picking up my clothes and making my way down the passageway to my room. She followed me, still naked, her feet making no sound on the thick carpets. I left my clothes on the floor and slipped between the sheets of my bed: she followed me and we lay together like tired children until, much later, I fell asleep.
When I awoke at eight the following morning she was gone.
53
All right, all right. I had more than a couple of drinks. Well, it was warm in the Beggar’s Club. I met a few friends who were playing cards and they bought me a drink. I bought a round myself, then we ordered a bite to eat, and with the cold and the walking and the drink, well, I was…delayed. Perhaps not delayed, exactly, but understand that I had been thinking hard as I walked and I had reached a difficult conclusion.
No need to look at me like that. Don’t think it was an easy decision to take. In fact, it was partly to forget what I had been obliged to do that I started on the brandy in the first place, and, well, one thing led to another and
I had almost managed to forget her altogether. I remember looking at my watch at five in the morning with something like shock; but by then, of course, it was too late. The decision was out of my hands.
I was too castaway to think of going home at that time; instead I gave the old harpy in charge of the club the last of my money in exchange for a room and crawled into bed in my shirt, intending to sleep until daylight then make my way home, but I had not been between the sheets for five minutes—I was already dozing comfortably—when something jolted me half-awake. I heard it again, a light, almost furtive scratching at the door, as of pointed fingernails just whispering against the uneven surface. Probably another customer, I thought, drunk as a wheelbarrow, wanting to share my room when he found all the others were full. Well, I had no intention of letting him in.
‘Room’s taken,’ I called from beneath the blankets. Silence. Perhaps I had imagined the scratching. I began to drift almost immediately towards sleep again. Then my attention was snagged again by the sound of the doorknob turning. I began to feel annoyed. Damn the fellow, would he never leave me in peace? The door was locked anyway, I thought. Once he realized that I meant what I said he would go away.
‘I said the room’s taken!’ I called loudly. ‘Clear off, like a good chap, and find somewhere else, won’t you?’ That should do it, I decided, and turned over, savouring the warmth of the blankets and the smoothness of the linen.
Then the door opened.
For a second I thought it was the door of the neighbouring room, but as I glanced over my shoulder I saw a wedge of greyish light from the nearby window and, outlined momentarily, a woman’s figure. Before I had time to react the door had closed again and I heard the small sounds of the woman’s footsteps approaching the bed. I was about to say something—my brain was still rather fuddled by all that brandy—when she stopped beside me and I realized that she was undressing.
Well, what do you think I did? Did you expect me to pull the sheets over my head and call for the landlady? Or play the prude and say: ‘Oh, miss, we hardly know each other’? No, I didn’t say anything at all; I just waited: the little I had seen of the girl told me she was young and had a good figure. Maybe she had seen me in the club and thought…You needn’t look so surprised, it’s happened to me before. It also occurred to me that she might have inadvertently come to the wrong room, in which case I would be wiser to hold my tongue; besides which, I wasn’t feeling half as tired as I had a minute previously.
She said nothing as her clothes slid to the ground in a rustle of silk: in the gloom I saw her pale figure move towards me, felt the weight of her on the coverlet and then beneath it as at last she slipped between the sheets with me. As she touched me I flinched. She was so cold that for an instant I had the disturbing illusion that her touch would tear my skin; but then her arms crept around me, teasingly, erotically, so that, in spite of the cold which sank into my limbs, I began to respond, to appreciate the voluptuousness of her freezing caresses. I could feel long hair falling over my face as she straddled me, hair as light and cold as cobwebs, her legs slim and strong, locking tightly around my ribs. And yet in spite of the novelty of it all I could have sworn she was familiar…Pointed fingernails gently raked my shivering shoulders. I heard her whisper something, almost inaudibly, against my face; instinctively I turned to hear her words.
‘Mose…’
Even her breath was cold, raising the hairs on my chest; but more than that was the sense of unease, growing now; the knowledge that I had met her before.
‘Mose…I looked for you for so long…oh, Mose.’
A moment, which was almost recognition.
‘I waited, but you never came. I’m so cold.’
There again: almost…but not quite. And somehow I didn’t want to ask who she was: just in case…I shifted uneasily, the fumes of the brandy clouding my thoughts; a memory blinked almost inconsequentially through the haze—myself at that long-past table-rapping party (I’m so cold) watching a glass which seemed to move across the polished surface on its own.
‘I’m so cold…’ Her whisper was forlorn, distant; a memory’s voice. I tried the jovial approach.
‘Not for long, darling. I’ll soon warm you up.’
As a matter of fact, I could feel my arousal waning. Her flesh was like clay beneath my frozen fingers.
‘I waited, Mose, for such a long time. I waited. But you never came. You never…’ Another long sigh, like echoes in a cavern.
Then a thought so absurd that I almost laughed aloud; my laughter catching in my throat as I considered the implications…
‘Effie?’
‘I…’
‘Oh God, Effie!’ Suddenly there could be no doubt. It was her: the scent of her skin, the feel of her hair, her lost voice whispering in the dark. My head was spinning and I cursed the brandy; from a distance I could hear my voice repeating her name, stupidly, like a broken doll.
‘But how did you get out? I…’ Lamely: ‘I meant to come, you know. I really did.’ Hastily inventing a reason: ‘There was a policeman on duty outside the cemetery when I came back so I couldn’t get in. I waited and waited…I was frantic with worry.’
‘I followed you,’ she said blankly. ‘I followed you here. I waited for you to come. Oh, Mose…’
The reality of my betrayal echoed between us, louder than words. I forced myself to speak, with counterfeit sincerity: ‘God, Effie, you don’t know. The damned flatfoot was there for hours…When I finally got past him, you were already gone. I must have missed you by minutes.’ I kissed her, with counterfeit passion. ‘For now, let’s just be grateful that we’re here together and you’re safe. All right?’ I forced my arms around her although I was shivering. ‘Just warm up now, darling, and try to sleep.’
‘Sleep…’ Her voice was almost inaudible now, her breath the tiniest whisper in the ear of the night. ‘No more sleep. I’ve slept enough.’
When I awoke four hours later she was gone and I could almost have believed that I had imagined the whole incident; but as if to prove that I had not dreamed her she had left her calling-card on the bedstand beside me: a silver brooch shaped like an arching cat.
54
Tabby came back from visiting her family early on the morning of Christmas Eve: I awoke to the sounds of activity from below stairs and dressed in haste. I met her on the stairs, carrying a tray of chocolate and biscuits for Effie.
‘Good morning, Tabby,’ I said, smiling and taking the tray. ‘Is that for Mrs Chester? I’ll take it.’
‘Oh, it’s no trouble at all, sir…’ she began, but I cut her short, saying affably:
‘I dare say you’ll have a lot to do today, Tabby. Do see if we have any letters this morning, then come to the drawing-room and I will tell you what Mrs Chester and I have planned.’
‘Very good, sir.’
I ran upstairs with the tray, tipped the chocolate out of the window and ate two of the biscuits. Then I unmade Effie’s bed, rumpled her nightdress and threw it on the floor and drew the curtains. I left the cup on the bedstand—it was the kind of disorder Effie liked to live in—and, feeling well pleased with my ingenuity, went back downstairs to deal with Tabby. I was feeling very much more in control this morning; I found I could look at Effie’s room, her things, touch her nightdress and the cup from which she had taken the drugged chocolate without as much as a qualm. It was as if my meeting with Marta the previous night had infused me with a new, indomitable spirit. The daylight had banished the night’s demons for good and in the drawing-room I took care to adopt a jovial tone with Tabby.
‘Tabby,’ I said with brisk good cheer, ‘today Mrs Chester has decided to surprise her mother with a Christmas visit. While she is out, you and I will surprise her.’
‘Sir?’ said Tabby politely.
‘You will go and buy enough holly and mistletoe to trim the whole house, then you will begin to prepare the finest Christmas dinner you have ever made. I want everything: quail’s eggs, goose, mushrooms…
and, of course, the finest chocolate log—you know how partial Mrs Chester is to chocolate. If anything can bring her back to her usual happy self, that will, don’t you think, Tabby?’
Tabby’s eyes gleamed. ‘Oh, yes, sir,’ she said happily. ‘I’ve been so worried about the poor young lady. She’s that thin, sir, she needs feeding up. Good honest feeding, that’s all she needs, never mind what that doctor says, and—’
‘Quite,’ I interrupted. ‘So, Tabby, not a word. Let it be our secret to surprise Mrs Chester. If you go out immediately you will be back in plenty of time to decorate the tree.’
‘Oh, sir!’ beamed Tabby. ‘My young lady will be pleased!’
‘I certainly hope so.’
As Tabby left the house with a jaunty step, I allowed myself the luxury of a smile; the worst was done. If Tabby could be convinced that all was well, then my troubles were over. I was almost looking forwards to the day’s shopping!
At about eleven o’clock I took a hack into Oxford Street and spent an hour or so looking at the shops. I bought a bag of chestnuts from an Irish costermonger and ate them with more relish than I had had for any food since I first met Marta, dropping the hot shells into the gutter and watching them float away on the grey river of melted snow. From one vendor I bought an ell of gold ribbon, from another a pair of pink kid gloves, from a third an orange. I almost forgot that I was acting a part and found myself carefully considering what kind of presents Effie would most like: would it be this pretty aquamarine pendant, this tortoiseshell comb, this bonnet, this shawl?
I went into a haberdasher’s and found myself in front of a display of nightwear, idly looking at nightgowns, caps, petticoats. Then I froze. On the display in front of me was the wrap, my mother’s peach silk négligée just as I remembered it, but new, the lace standing out from the thin silk like sea foam. I was filled with an immense, furious compulsion: I had to have it. Impossible for me to have walked away and left it, glorious trophy of my victory over guilt. I bore it away with a sense of dizzy exhilaration.
Sleep, Pale Sister Page 24