The Curfew Circle

by Nina Dreyer

  John leaned on the door frame and observed her. She sat in perfect stillness, hands folded, like a wax likeness, silently, patiently, like she was waiting for something. For him, perhaps. A lock of her lustrous dark hair had unfastened and fell in a drooping wave down her pale neck. Her skin was as colourless and translucent as cigarette paper.

  ‘Did you eat?’ John sauntered over to her, hands in his pocket. ‘You’re no good to us dead. Well.’ He smiled. ‘Probably.’

  Marion breathed deeply, seemingly rousing herself from deep thought. She looked up at him. ‘That doctor of yours…’ Her voice was hushed and deep, but her accent seemed thicker, as if she’d worn out her ability to soften it. John found it mildly unsettling. You didn’t expect pretty, cultured women to speak with such an accent. He shrugged the thought away and lit a cigarette. ‘Don’t be worrying about the doctor. He means well, bless.’

  ‘He asked too many questions,’ she said quietly.

  ‘I just wanted to satisfy myself that you’d not come to any real harm. Nobody heard from you for ages, and then I find you sitting in the middle of a pool of blood…’ John reached for her arm, but she rose sharply from the sofa.

  ‘I can’t stay.’ She glided across the floor, turning her head and taking in the dusty books cases, the displays of antique Ouija boards. She stopped in front of a low table, upon which stood a row of white plaster figures. ‘What are these?’

  ‘Imprints. From the old days,’ John leaned back and followed her every movement with her eyes. ‘Ectoplasmic imprints of the hands of otherworldly visitors. Well, so Sid would have you believe. I never credited it. Sid and his friends made them, back in the Seventies and Eighties.’ He sighed. ‘I suppose he keeps them around for sentimental value.’

  She nodded slowly, trailing a fingertip along the palm of a young man’s severed plaster hand.

  ‘Marion, I have to ask you what happened back in your rooms.’

  She froze, her finger still resting on the plaster hand. All light seemed to drain out of her eyes.

  The sound of rain drumming on the boarded window and gurgling in the drain pies filled the silence.

  ‘Listen, Marion,’ he leaned forward, clasping his hands and resting his elbows on his knees, ‘you are going to have to tell me what happened in that room. Marion. I mean it.’

  She looked at him for a long moment, her eyes glistening. ‘I will tell you one day, John. I promise you that.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘When the war is over.’ She glanced at a point in the darkness behind him. ‘When all the boys have come home.’

  John shuddered, a snip of worry that her mind really was beginning to unravel. He lowered his voice. ‘If you’ve been involved in some sort of,’ he searched for the right word, ‘incident, then you have to tell me.’

  She began slowly circling the room. Her footfall made hardly any noise at all, as though she floated above the hard oak floor.

  John grimaced and rubbed his eyes. ‘Look. I’ll keep it between us. But you do have to tell me.’

  He started at she touched his shoulder. She’d moved behind the chair without him hearing her. He looked up at her. ‘I’m not going to let you out of here until you tell me,’ he said.

  ‘Then we shall be here,’ she sighed, ‘until the British Army has turned to dust.’

  John frowned.

  ‘Of course,’ she continued, unsteadily circling the room, ‘you can always attempt to wrench my secrets from me by force. I hear you are an adept at psychical phenomena, hypnosis, paranormal perception’ she said.

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Is it true? Eilis says you have published several articles on the subject. Perhaps you should try it now, on me,’ she said, her voice thickening. She swayed a little and steadied herself with a hand on the table. ‘See if you can crack open my mind like a,’ she snapped her fingers softly, ‘like a walnut.’

  She was wearing thin now, John thought. Burning through the last of her poise to drive him away from the point. He’d only have to wait. Dr. Grey was wrong. She wasn’t delusional, she was shaken and exhausted. Unlike Dr. Grey, John could tell the difference, because unlike Dr. Grey, John had seen people shoved beyond the outer limits of endurance, into a delirious exhaustion so deep it made you feel drunk, made you think the black outline of trees against a night sky were moving towards you.

  John rose and reached for her shoulder.

  She turned her back and hid her face in her hands. Her weeping was as soundless as her step. You could only tell that she was crying by the shuddering of her back and shoulders. She dug under her shirt and tugged out a strange little medallion, clutching it in her limp hands. ‘I have to be strong,’ she moaned, her voice slurred with tears.

  ‘Ah, here. Don’t cry.’ John reached for her with a rush of tenderness. She was so delicate, almost otherworldly, so gentle, crying like that over spilt blood.

  She slumped towards him, pressing her cheek to his chest. His coat slipped from her narrow shoulders and fell to the floor.

  John stood very still, holding his breath, afraid she’d draw back. Carefully, he wrapped an arm around her, shushing her. He felt the warmth of her skin through the threadbare silk shirt. He closed his eyes and breathed the scent of her hair. ‘It’s alright. Don’t worry about a thing. You’ll just stay here for the night. Nothing will happen tonight.’ A grip of fear tightened in his chest. The gunmen. Crawling around at night, and Marion, wandering in the curfew darkness all alone. Maybe they really had seen her. Maybe they really had targeted her. Unless he watched over her, she’d slip out in the small hours and hurl herself back into the night. Alone.

  Steadying her very gently, as if she were made of bone china, he snatched the fallen coat and brought her into one of the little backrooms burrowed deep inside the Salon, for mediums to rest after difficult seances.

  By the door stood a dusty elephant’s foot full of old umbrellas. A sagging purple fainting couch stood in the corner. Grey moon-gloom illuminated it in sheets of rain and shadow. Over it hung a limp tapestry showing a white unicorn with a crown around its neck, resting in a walled garden. Marion was leaning on his arm, and he gently laid her down on the couch. She curled up on her side and knotted her fists by her face, groaning mournfully.

  ‘Hush,’ he whispered, ‘I’ll look after you.’ From a sideboard, he took a small jewel-green kerosene lamp and lit it with a scrape of a match. He put it on the worn floorboards, and it cast a shimmering, underwater glow in the darkness.

  John sat down on a creaky old ottoman and watched her struggle into sleep, listening in the dark to the deep rhythm of her breathing. He tried to suppress the impulse to attempt to loosen her corset. So she could breathe properly.

  The hours ticked away, into the curfew and beyond midnight.

  Breath bated in the dark, John leaned closer and smoothed a tumbled lock of hair from Marion’s forehead. In her sleep, she moaned something and suddenly reached out, grasping his wrist.

  His heart skipped a beat. An image flickered in his mind, brief and luminous. Marion walking barefoot in swaying summer grasses in the ancient walled garden at Gorse Hall, sunlight dappling her shoulders through the broad oaks and willows. Smiling, safe in the gardens of his old home, summer wind rippling her dark hair. Larks hurtling high above. He sighed and rubbed his forehead. She’d never want that. She’d never come with him, because she was just like him. She wanted to stay in harm’s way and help. Flying straight into the gathering storm.

  Chapter Nine

  The following afternoon, Marion knocked on Eilis’s front door, clutching her hands tightly over her stomach and fighting back the urge to hurry back down the garden path before anyone answered.

  The maid opened, grunted amicably and led Marion through the house to the winter garden, a delicate Victorian glass structure nestled in the overgrown back garden. The low November sun gleamed weakly through coloured glass panels.

  Eilis reclined amid a sea of Persian rugs and v
elvet cushions. ‘Marion?’ She looked up from her book. ‘There you are! Good grief, what in the world happened to you? You look like death reheated. Come over her and sit down at once, no, not over there, here by my side.’

  Marion sat down on the edge of a low divan. Her heart pounded in her throat. ‘I just… didn’t sleep well last night.’ She glanced down at her hands. Crust of blood had dried under her nails. It hadn’t come out, even though she’d scrubbed and scrubbed in the cold sink in a backroom in the Salon. She scratched at it with a fingernail.

  Eilis snapped her finger at the maid. ‘Get some tea. The good Ceylon. Lots of sugar.’

  The girl shuffled out.

  ‘I was half beginning to worry,’ said Eilis, ‘we said you were coming to see me yesterday? And now I hear from Georgie Simard that you were at the Salon with John this very morning?’ She pursed her lips.

  Marion twisted a ring on her right hand. ‘I was only there to… collect a few things.’ Her neck ached from sleeping on the sofa, and her corset and garter straps had dug into her skin against the creaking old springs. When she’d awoken, sometime in the late morning, John had sat in the corner, arms crossed, head leaned back, fast asleep in the slanting morning light. He’d watched over her all through the night. And while she slept, he’d laid a crisp white handkerchief by her hand on the sofa. Monogrammed. To dry her tears. She still had it in her pocket.

  ‘Oh, well then.’ Eilis raised one perfect eyebrow. ‘I’d be very hurt if you were having little rendezvous at the Salon without inviting me. But you wouldn’t do that, would you?’

  Marion pressed her lips together and swallowed dryly. She had formed the words in her minds like a recital as she walked here through grey crowds and bristling roadblocks. Your husband is a gunman. He put a gun to my head. You must bring him home before he gets himself killed by the English. She could still feel the icy cold of the gunmetal grazing her cheek. She tugged at her collar. ‘Have you…’ She cleared her throat and darted a glance at the framed photographs clustered on little sideboards and tables around the room. Liam’s face would be among them. Liam, dressed for the altar, smiling with his bride-

  ‘Look at this.’ Eilis handed her a small green cloth-bound book with delicate gold lettering. Her eyes shone with an odd light. ‘A bit of Irish culture for you.’ She looked on almost hungrily as Marion hesitatingly took the book and turned a page to read.

  ‘Were you but lying cold and dead, and lights were paling out of the West,’ Marion read aloud, trying to focus on the page, ‘you would come hither, and bend your head, and I would lay my head on your breast,’ Marion’s voice shrank to a whisper.

  ‘Yeats. I knew you’d like him.’ Eilis smiled. ‘It’s about Aedh, the ancient Irish god of death.’

  Marion looked at the page again. ‘Is he only the god of the Irish dead?’ She bit her lip and cursed herself inwardly for trying to keep her tone so light. There was no time to discuss poetry. She would have to bring it up, to face it, to tell Eilis-

  ‘For a prize medium, you really do take everything very literally,’ Eilis laughed. She pulled up the sagging shoulder of her painted kimono. ‘He’s in love, that’s the point. But his beloved is still alive, so he can’t have her. I don’t know what Mr. Yeats meant, but that’s what I take from it. It’s very sweet, don’t you think?’

  Marion nodded. She’d never come across such a vision before. An afterlife ruled by a god who would not ravage through continents and crush a whole generation into the mud, but would reach out his fingers, pale as moonlight, to touch the hem of one beloved woman, longing for her to join him in his dark halls. Marion wished she could believe in a death-god like that.

  ‘You can keep the book. Read it. You’ll like it.’

  Marion lowered her head. She opened her mouth to speak, but her throat felt raw, her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth. She rubbed her fingers. Her hands felt cold and numb, as cold and numb as the waxen hand of that young man, growing weaker in her grip, slipping downward into death, his blood pooling into her floorboards. She shook herself and took a deep breath. ‘Eilis, there is something I meant to ask you. Have you seen your-’

  Marion started when the maid came trudging in, heaving a tray. Steam swirled from the silver tea pot as she set it down between them. Then she began to light all the little coloured glass lamps. The gloom descended a little from the room.

  Marion waited, digging her nails into her palms until the girl had shuffled out. ‘Have you seen Liam recently,’ she blurted out before she could stop herself.

  ‘No, not recently,’ Eilis sighed.

  ‘Does he,’ Marion cleared her throat again and wrung the handkerchief in her pocket, ‘does he write? To tell you about his days, his… work?’

  Eilis leaned back, blowing on her tea cup. ‘Why,’ she asked slowly, ‘do you ask that?’

  Marion opened her mouth, but no words came. A clammy heat rose in her face. She mustn’t sweat. Tell-tale sweat. Not in front of Eilis. But the room began to feel too hot, stifling, like a tropical greenhouse, airless, overstuffed with cushions and rubbery, insect-like plants and orchids. ‘I just thought… it must be hard, being apart so much.’

  ‘I used to think I’d have a couple of kids playing in this garden by now,’ said Eilis quietly. ‘Sure that’s hard when your husband is never around, isn’t it? Sure it’s not as if I have a games keeper or chauffeur who can perform the deed.’ She chuckled joylessly.

  Marion bit the inside of her cheek. She’d only met Liam once before, briefly. Tall and expressionless, and had seemed to regard Eilis’ interests with a complete but benevolent indifference. Eilis had said he had something to do with the government, so Marion had just assumed he worked in some administrative position, something to do with train schedules perhaps, he had that kind of face, or municipal post management. How wrong she’d been.

  ‘Can I ask you something, Marion?’ Eilis tugged at her lip.

  Marion nodded without looking her in the eye.

  ‘How come you never married, yourself?’

  ‘Me? Oh, you know.’ She pretended to fiddle with the small mother-of-pearl buttons on her cuffs. ‘It was hard, during the war. There were so few men around. And so much hardship. Nobody had time for romance.’

  Eilis nodded thoughtfully. ‘I’d no idea Belgium was that badly torn up by the war. I mean, forgive me, I suppose I ought to know that. I thought you were just overrun by the Hun, occupied, and that was that. The Western Front didn’t cut into Belgium, did it?’

  ‘Well, you know,’ Marion shifted uneasily in her seat. ‘We should all be thankful that we didn’t suffer more than we did. But-’

  ‘Very stoical of you,’ said Eilis. ‘You know, I always admired you for that. Nothing ever gets you down, does it? You’re like a little battleship, sallying forth bravely over the heaving seas.’

  Marion ground her teeth and looked down at her hands.

  ‘Is something wrong, pet?’ Eilis pursed her lips. ‘You’re in such a strange mood today. Oh, I know. John’s been upsetting you, hasn’t he?’

  Marion blinked. ‘John? Oh. No. It’s nothing. Really.’

  Eilis patted her hand. ‘So you won’t tell me? Well, pet, you know you can’t keep secrets from me.’ She rose, went to the other room and returned, smiling, with a bundle of blood-red velvet. ‘Here. Regardez-vous,’ she put the bundle on the table and unwrapped it. Inside was a carved rosewood box, a little bigger than a jewellery case. Eilis opened it and took out a set of thick Tarot cards, larger than usual and painted with radiant colours.

  ‘Behold,’ Eilis laid down the King of Swords with a flourish, as though the card were an ace to end a game. Marion wiped her eye and leaned closer, studying the careful brush strokes. She herself could not read the cards. Her former tutors in the occult had regarded them as frivolous. But she knew that ordinarily, the King of Swords was a stern-looking bureaucrat with a brown cape and shovel-like sword. This King of Swords was young and slender with delicate finger
s clasping a rapier, a heavy purple robe and an iron crown of seven points.

  ‘I thought your new deck was intended to reflect the horrors of the modern world,’ said Marion, in the lightest tone she could manage.

  ‘Oh no,’ Eilis snorted, ‘you’re thinking of Marcellier’s new abomination. Lord, spare us from that. Nothing to do with proper Tarot, that. Only a Parisian imagination could conjure such a spectacle.’

  Marion nodded. She’d glimpsed several sketches of Marcellier’s new work in the cold spring of 1919, and still shuddered at the memory. His ragged, uneven black lines heaved and convulsed above the gaping charnel pits of Europe. His Tarot cards were not oracular dreams of a shimmering otherworld. They were invocations to the chasm, the maelstrom of destruction and mud-choked death which had opened beneath all their lives six years previously.

  Eilis flipped down some more cards. ‘And why on earth would we want the horror of the modern world reflected anywhere, we have quite enough of that lately, thanks all the same. Did you hear about the commotion in the streets the other night? Shootings. Ambushes. Terrible.’

  Marion’s pulse contorted in her chest. She opened her mouth to speak. Her tongue felt dry as sand. Her own croaking voice echoed in her mind, her pleas, don’t hurt me, Liam, you know me, I am your wife’s best friend. Sweat began prickling down her back.

  Eilis cut the cards, in calm, deliberate movements that somehow made Marion feel on edge. Like a surgeon preparing the tools.

  ‘Here, pick three cards.’

  Marion swallowed and reached out to choose. She was gripped with the urgent desire that the cards reveal everything, in excruciating, improbable detail. A card with a young man lying wounded on the floor, a card with the muzzle of a gun glinting in dim light. A card with a woman holding secrets in her chest like tumours. A card with a lost husband aiming a gun in moonlight. She let her hand hover over the cards.

  ‘Come on now, pet, pick.’

  Marion made her choices. Eilis snapped the cards from her and laid them out, quickly, precisely, in a sharp geometric pattern. Marion watched her closely. Eilis was a professional, smoothly at ease. Unlike some others, she never frowned in mock-concern or astonishment before delivering her verdicts.