‘Does this mean that you’re going to come clean?’
‘Oh, I think my cover’s blown now, don’t you? You’re not the only one who knows. I had to tell the police: they thought it was hilarious. You can just imagine! I don’t think it’s going to stay a secret for long. What about my idea for the course?’
I sat back and considered. How would Lawrence react to this? What if it got into the newspapers? It would be the quirky story of the week: the romantic female novelist who’s really a male academic. Oh, God … But then I saw the flip side of it. How would it look if everyone in the department that had nurtured a best-selling new talent was made redundant? What would Lawrence think about having that all over the papers? I couldn’t wait to see his face when I pointed this out to him. As for the RAE, if Aiden went part-time we could still use his academic books and articles, and we could appoint another part-timer whose research could also be used. Aiden wasn’t a liability, he was a trump card. And he was quite right about the popularity of creative writing courses: students would flock in.
I was still smiling to myself when I got out of the lift on the top floor of the library. It was a few moments before it occurred to me that I hadn’t been up here since the day of my collapse. As I made my way through the dark stacks to the front of the building, I was glad to see that there were other people working up there today. There was even someone at the table where I’d been sitting. The tables and the carpet tiles had assumed their mundane identities and nothing could have looked more ordinary or familiar. I sat down at the table nearest to the one I had sat at before. It was chilly up here. When I put my hand on the radiator, it was lukewarm. I looked down the corridor into which the tables were squeezed between the windows and the stacks. I could see an occasional head bent over a book.
In the blink of an eye everything changed. It was dark, the heads had disappeared; in the white wall at the end of the corridor a door was opening. For a moment I felt a nightmare terror of danger and entrapment, and with it an absolute conviction that I was on the brink of a momentous discovery. I gasped and blinked again. The wintry sunshine, the other scholars, the ordinary day had returned. My pulse was racing and my mouth had gone dry. I put both hands palm down on the table. The floor felt reassuringly solid beneath my feet. The flashback had lasted for only a split second, like a flash of lightning across a dark landscape.
Cautiously I closed my eyes and opened them again. Nothing happened. I got up and looked out of the window. Down below, the mist had grown thicker. I could see the outlines of Clare College and, beyond, King’s College, floating in mid-air like ghosts. If the weather got worse I might not be able to get home. I wondered if I should ring Stephen and go back with him, but I remembered that he was seeing a client in Bury St Edmunds this afternoon. Was I fit to drive? I tried to assess the situation objectively. The momentary sensation had been more like a vivid memory than a hallucination. I was completely fine now. But it was difficult to weigh up the pros and cons in a rational way, because all of a sudden I longed more than anything to be at home. The Old Granary drew me to it like a beacon. The central heating had been on for twenty-four hours, the fridge was full of food and Bill Bailey would be waiting for me. I decided to drive very slowly and pull over and use my mobile phone if I felt at all odd. I absolutely couldn’t wait a moment longer.
As I hurried down the stairs to collect my coat and bag, I decided not to go round and see Alison. I’d ring her again from home. If there was still no reply, I would get in touch with Jane and ask her to check up on them. She lived only ten minutes’ walk away from them. The folder of articles could always be collected tomorrow.
I didn’t have to make a conscious effort to drive slowly. On the A14 the fog rolled towards me in milky waves. By the time I turned off onto the single-track lane that leads to the Old Granary, I could scarcely see more than two or three feet to either side of me. The drainage channel that runs to the left of the track was completely invisible. It would be all too easy to veer off into it. I changed down to second gear and slowed to a crawl. The windscreen looked greasy with moisture. The fog hung in front of me like a thick curtain of cobwebs. My eyes began to ache from peering into it. I had to resist the notion that if I opened the car windows I would be able to see better.
When the track turned away from the channel, visibility improved a little. Behind me, a large low sulphurous sun was releasing a dingy yellow light into the fog. Monstrous forms moved steadily towards me, assuming their identities as trees or pieces of farm equipment only when they were almost upon me.
I hit a denser patch. Here I could see less than a metre ahead, and the side of the track had disappeared. I pulled up. Should I leave the car and walk the rest of the way? It would be easier to be sure that I was still on the track if I was on foot.
I rang Stephen on my mobile phone. When he answered, I could tell from his voice that he wasn’t alone.
‘You’re still with your client?’ I asked.
‘Yes, where are you?’
‘I’m about a quarter of a mile from home – about halfway up the track. It’s dense fog. I’m going to leave the car and walk the rest of the way.’
‘Oh, God. Are you all right?’ His voice was fading.
‘Yes, fine.’
‘I’ll leave right away.’
‘Stephen, be careful. It’s very foggy on the A14 and I think it’s getting worse.’
‘I will. Bye.’ His voice was very faint as if it was coming from a great distance.
I heard a click from the phone. The brief contact had been comforting while it lasted, but now I felt more alone than ever.
I decided to move my car off the track so that Stephen wouldn’t run into it. When I opened the car door it was as if a cold, damp flannel had been pressed to my face. Gripping the door, I struggled awkwardly to my feet. Even after a few feet the outline of the car grew blurred. As I thought, I was on the edge of a field. I got back into the car and eased it gently onto the verge. I took the torch out of the glove compartment and put it in my coat pocket. My mobile phone went in the other one. My briefcase is the kind with a shoulder strap, so I put my handbag in it and slung it across my body so as to keep my hands free. Now that the moment had come, I was reluctant to leave the warm, enclosed space of the car, but it was time to go. I locked the car and turned towards home.
In moments my coat was covered in hundreds of tiny globules of water, and the damp had penetrated to my scalp. I reached as if to lift my hair so that I could put my collar up. I was disconcerted when I felt only my bare neck. Of course: I had short hair now. I stepped forward, careful to plant each foot firmly, looking every time to check that I was still on the track. It was like trying to find your way around a house in the dark. It required all my concentration, but at the same time it was monotonous. There was nothing to see except the rutted track. The sound of my footsteps was muffled, and they echoed dully in the fog. More than once I stopped abruptly, thinking for a moment that someone was following me. But always when I stopped, the echo did too. I plodded on.
The sun had almost disappeared. It was no more than a faint intensification of light behind me. The rhythm of my footsteps and the lack of stimulation had a lulling effect; I felt dreamy and detached. The fog seemed to be getting into my head. Thoughts and memories drifted through my mind in a lazy, inconsequential way. I saw again the stream of images that had appeared on the inside of my eyelids with cinematic vividness – my conversation with Cathy at the party, the little face of the Snow Queen looking up from her lacquered box, my interview with Rebecca. It was as if the visit to the top floor of the library had shaken things loose in my mind. I saw them again, but now they were mingled with more recent memories: Jim telling me that the police had made an arrest, the moment when I knew who Annabelle Fairchild was, the pages of Merfyn’s book tumbling out of the envelope. So much had happened that I didn’t seem to have absorbed it all. The images went round and round in my head like figures on a carousel. Every t
ime I tried to focus on one, it vanished and another took its place.
The rhythm of a tune began to form itself in my head. De de de de de diddly-de, de dum diddly-de .. Words attached themselves to it, fragments of a song perhaps: ‘the stress of the storm, the post of the foe’. No, not a song, but a poem, something stirring, heroic, portentous. How did it begin? ‘Fear death?’: the words rang out in my head like the notes of a trumpet. Yes, that was it. ‘Fear death? To feel the fog in my throat, the mist in my face.’ It was by Browning, but I couldn’t remember any more. Those few lines played themselves out again and again in my head, and I noticed that I was walking in step to their rhythm.
The fog was tinged with blue. I looked back and saw that the sun had disappeared. My toes and fingers were numb. It was getting colder and I wasn’t moving fast enough to keep warm. I felt that I had been doing this for a long, long time. It was hard to visualize a world of warmth and light and distant horizons. Surely I ought to be home by now? I raised my arm to look at my watch. There was a burst of light, as though I had commanded the sun to rise in front of me and it had miraculously obeyed. I was rooted to the spot, dazzled and confused. Then I realized that I had triggered off the security light.
Once inside with the door bolted behind me, I went round the house putting on all the lights. Bill Bailey followed at my heels. When I sank gratefully into an armchair in my study, he sprang up and landed neatly on my knees. Still the half-remembered poem jangled infuriatingly in my head. After a bit I pushed Bill Bailey off my lap and heaved myself to my feet. I took my collected Browning off the shelf and looked up ‘Fear death?’ in the index of first lines. I turned to page 656 and read:
Fear death? To feel the fog in my throat,
The mist in my face,
When the snows begin, and the blasts denote
I am nearing the place,
The power of the night, the press of the storm,
The post of the foe;
Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form
Yet the strong man must go.
The strong woman, too, I thought. I had just read those extraordinary lines for the second time when I noticed that the little red light on the answering machine was blinking. I reached over and pressed playback. The whirr of the tape rewinding was followed by Jim’s voice, terse and apologetic: ‘Cassandra, I’m sorry, but the business with the drug addict is a complete non-starter. He’s remembered all of it, the dozy bugger: the attack wasn’t in Cambridge, turns out it was Welwyn Garden City. He was too high to see that the girl was more frightened than hurt. That’s why we didn’t make the connection. Look, take care of yourself. I’ll speak to you again soon.’
At the very moment that the machine clicked off, my stomach lurched. Low down in the small of my back, I felt a gripping pain at once strangely familiar and entirely new. In that instant my life seemed to fly apart and fall into a new shape like the pattern in a kaleidoscope. Everything that had gone before seemed now to have been only a preparation for this moment.
I was alone in a fog-bound house in the middle of the fens and I had gone into labour.
Chapter Twenty-One
My first instinct was to consult a book. Perhaps these might be the notorious false pains that I had read about. Probably the baby wouldn’t come for days, I told myself, this is just a trial run, a limbering up for the main event. Even if it is the real thing, first deliveries are usually very slow. I’ve probably got hours and hours. I pushed to the back of my mind stories of peasant women giving birth in the fields in a break from digging up turnips.
I opened my handbook for expectant mothers and flicked hastily past rather graphic images of foetuses and uteruses to find the section about the onset of labour. At first I couldn’t take it in. I forced myself to focus on the page. False labour pains were common in the few weeks before delivery, I read, but they could be easily recognized because they were irregular and would diminish in a few hours; true ones came at regular intervals and would gradually increase in intensity. I knew that if it was true labour, ten-minute intervals were the signal that I ought to get to hospital. I looked at my watch. A few minutes past five.
I put the book down open on my desk and looked out of the window. The fog was dingier and greyer. Night was falling. I sat for a while, trying to relax and wondering when the next contraction would come.
The telephone rang.
‘Cass? Oh good, you’ve got home safely,’ Stephen said. ‘I’ve decided not to come home along the A14. You know what lunatics people can be in this sort of weather. I don’t want to be involved in a pile-up so I’m coming along the back roads.’
‘Where are you now?’
‘Just outside Mildenhall. The fog’s so thick that it’s like driving into a loaf of bread. I’ve already passed a couple of minor accidents.’
I told him about the pains and about Jim’s message.
‘Oh, my goodness! Are you OK? How do you feel?’
‘I’m fine. It’s probably not – oh, ouch!’ I said, more in surprise than pain.
‘What’s that? What is it?’
‘Just a twinge.’ I lied. ‘And even if it’s the real thing, nothing’s going to happen for ages, perhaps even days.’
‘Look, if it gets any worse, ring for an ambulance. I’ll be there as soon as I can.’
He hung up. That was all very well, I thought, but how is an ambulance going to get here through this fog? I looked at my watch. Twenty-five minutes since the last contraction. I looked again at the book: ‘The contractions of true labour initially last about thirty seconds and occur at regular intervals of about fifteen to twenty minutes.’
I rang my doctor’s surgery. The line was engaged. On impulse I flicked through the phone book and tried another number.
‘Hello, Dr Pennyfeather speaking.’
‘Jane, hello. It’s Cassandra.’
‘Cassandra! How are you?’ she said warmly.
Just the sound of her voice was reassuring.
‘Well, actually, I think I may be going into labour. And I’m stuck here at home on my own and it’s incredibly foggy. Stephen’s on his way, but I don’t know how long it will take him.’
‘OK. The first thing is to relax. Now, when did you get the first contraction? And how long between that and the next one?’
I told her.
‘You’re right. If the baby’s not due for another six weeks, it’s most likely a false alarm, and even if it isn’t, you’ve probably got hours. But Cassandra, you must stay put. Don’t try to get to a neighbour’s. If things suddenly speed up, you need to be where it’s warm and light.’
Peasant women in fields. I saw myself lying panting in a ditch like someone in a Thomas Hardy novel. I thought of something that had horrified me when I read it as a student: Tolstoy’s terrible description of Princess Lisa dying in childbirth. During my pregnancy I’d managed to put it in the recesses of my mind, but now it all came back to me: the shrieks and helpless animal moans, and at the end of it, the doctor rushing distracted from the room …
‘Cassandra? Cassandra? Are you still there?’
‘Oh, God, what am I going to do? I don’t want to be alone.’
‘You won’t be. Who’s your GP?’
‘I’m registered with Dr Devlin in Ely.’
‘I’m acting as locum in Histon – you’ve come through to me here on my mobile – so I’m probably as near as anyone. I’ll leave now. If the pains get worse or the time between contractions drops down to ten minutes, let me know. Oh, and Cassandra, one last thing: keep yourself occupied. Do some work, bake a cake or read a book.’
After we had stopped speaking, I stood by the window looking out. I couldn’t even see the ground. I seemed to be floating in a void. It struck me that being in the womb might be like this. I turned to look into the room: the lamps shed pools of soft light, but the corners of the room were dim. I became aware of a gentle rumbling: it was Bill Bailey snuffling. He was coiled up in a tight ball on the chair
, his white nose buried in a tail nearly as thick and bushy as a fox’s brush.
I switched on the radio and heard the end of the news and then the weather forecast. ‘There is thick fog over parts of East Anglia. Visibility is extremely poor and driving conditions hazardous. Motorists are advised not to travel unless their journey is essential.’
I heard Big Ben striking six. As if on cue there was another contraction and the phone rang.
‘I’m at Fordham now,’ Stephen said, ‘but I can only go at a snail’s pace. How are you?’
‘It might be the real thing.’
‘Oh no!’
‘It’s all right,’ I said with an assurance that I didn’t feel. ‘There’s a long time to go yet, and I rang Jane Pennyfeather. She’s coming over from Histon.’
‘OK. Keep your chin up, sweetie. See you soon.’
In my mind I saw a map of the area and on it two cars crawling towards me from opposite directions, their drivers peering through windscreens, inching forwards into the fog. I went back to the window and gazed out. I thought of one day telling my daughter about how we’d been here alone together in the fog and the night as I waited for her to arrive. Something flickered on the extreme edge of my field of vision. I turned my head. The fog had parted momentarily, and just for an instant I thought I saw a dark shape standing there. The fog closed in again and it was gone. I stared and stared, straining my eyes against the opaque resistance of the fog. I saw nothing. A shrub or a tree, I told myself, that’s what it must have been. The fog was disorientating and I couldn’t quite think what was at that side of the garden.
I found myself gritting my teeth against the next pang. Remembering the few antenatal classes that I’d managed to get to, I inhaled slowly and relaxed on the out breath. This time the pain ran through my whole body in a spasm that left me aching all over. I glanced at my watch: six fifteen. Jane’s advice to keep busy was good – and God knows, I had enough to do – but like a lot of good advice, it was very hard to follow. At this rate, I would be finishing the RAE report in the maternity ward. I wished that I had managed to get hold of the missing box file.
Murder Is Academic Page 21