Nor was there any word from Isabel on her answering machine in New York.
Leo looked down at her list again and studied the names, together with the brief notes she had made next to them. She added the name Paola, beside that of Daniel Lukas. She couldn’t place where, but she knew that she had seen or heard the name before. She focused on the name at the top of her list, Hamish Macgregor, and the words ‘jilted lover?’ she had written next to it. A memory sprang into her mind. Isabel at a party, way back when it must have been, because she could see Jeff clearly at her side. Isabel was laughing, her face radiant. ‘The current boyfriend told me to go and get shrunk ‘cause I can’t sleep with the light off. What he’s really enraged by is the fact that I kick him out of bed before dawn. Don’t want to wake up with him there, do I!’
As if someone had pushed a fast-forward button, the laughing face underwent a metamorphosis. It was suddenly very white, the eyes protruding in terror.
Leo leapt up to pay her bill and wiped the image away. That’s what worry was about, she told herself - producing the worst imaginable picture, so as to prevent its realization. Daniel Lukas had refused to understand that. Maybe shrinks were so busy delving into the past that they had no idea how people went about arming themselves for the future.
Though she wasn’t altogether certain it was true, the thought gave Leo a moment’s pleasure.
Daniel Lukas heaved the small boy onto his shoulders, waited for the ‘giddy-up’ and cantered towards the net which hung from the back of the house.
‘OK. Now. Get it in there. Yes!’
The black and white ball looped through the net and bounced onto the grass. The boy squealed and clapped his hands. ‘I did it! I did it!’
‘You did.’ Daniel let him scramble for the ball and then hugged him close. ‘You want to try again?
Robbie nodded, his face too serious. ‘I’ll see how many I can get out of ten.’
‘Three would be good.’
‘I got three last time. Six would be better.’
‘We’ll try for six then.’
They played. When Robbie reached the magical score of six, he beamed. ‘Shall I try one more?’
‘One more it is.’
The ball teetered round the edge of the basket and edged through.
‘Yes!’ Robbie raised his fist in football fan triumph. ‘We did it, pops.’
‘Did it brilliantly. And now it’s time for some food. I can smell it cooking.’ Daniel took his son by the hand and led him through the garden door into the kitchen.
‘I wish mummy could have seen me.’
Daniel held his breath. The boy hadn’t mentioned his mother for some weeks now and though he never wanted to force the talk, he was always pleased when Robbie initiated it. ‘So do I. She would have been proud.’
‘That lady had hair like mummy.’
‘Which lady?’
Robbie cast him a suspicious look as he clambered into the chair at one end of the long refectory table. ‘The one who was coming out of the house when we got home. Didn’t she Martina?’ He addressed the young jean-clad woman who was positioning a large bowl between them.
‘She did. Almost like your mummy’s.’
‘I thought she’d gone by the time you arrived,’ Daniel murmured. He thanked the au pair with a nod and forked pasta into three plates.’
‘No. And it was just like mummy’s,’ Robbie insisted. ‘Didn’t you notice?’
‘Now that you mention it…’
‘You’ve forgotten mummy,’ the child accused him.
The comment surprised him. He was about to deny his son’s statement, but he held back. The boy was telling him something. Telling him with the inevitable attendant guilt that he, himself, occasionally forgot about his mother. He tried to choose his words with care. ‘We can’t remember all the time, Robbie,’ he said slowly. ‘We couldn’t get on with things if we did. But that doesn’t mean we forget. I haven’t forgotten. You haven’t forgotten.’
‘I’ve forgotten her nose.’
‘Nose?’ Daniel laughed. ‘We can look at some pictures later, if you like.’
‘OK.’
After he had tucked his son into bed and they had read two of his favourite picture books together, Daniel went back up to the consulting room which doubled as his study. He was troubled by the fact that his new patient had overlapped with his son’s return home. He had thought he had timed it better. Robbie must have been first out of school today and covered the short distance home in record time.
With Eva’s death, he had decided to move his consulting room into the house. It saved travel time and since he had cut down the number of private patients he saw, it also saved on expenditure. With careful scheduling, there was no need for his professional life to intrude on the boy’s home life. That was essential both for his ever-fanciful patients and for his equally impressionable child. But today there had been a blip. Not that the effect it had produced had been altogether bad. Robbie had made use of it in his own way. And after dinner, when they had gone upstairs to look at photographs, they had both managed to laugh at a picture in which Eva was pulling one of her funny faces.
More than ten months had now passed since the cancer had taken her over and away. Ten months during which mourning had driven them over its bumpy course. At first Robbie had been frantic, throwing himself violently into activity, endlessly visiting friends, refusing any conversation which might have to do with his mother’s death, denying the loss. Then a kind of depression had set in. He was listless, absent-minded, short-tempered, refusing food. Daniel had made him talk then, abstractly at first, about plants and animals dying and then increasingly about his feelings, about what he missed of his mother, her hugs or grumpiness or piano playing.
Daniel had told him that sometimes he, himself, felt so angry about being abandoned that he wanted to throw things. It didn’t seem fair. And the boy had taken his cue and thrown a toy monster across the room and whether by accident or intention had managed to shatter a framed photograph of his mother. There had been tears after that and little by little more talk. And now gradually, he hoped that the boy’s precarious sense of power would come into perspective. He knew its wild fluctuations. Badly dented and he was guilty of not having been able to keep his mother alive; overblown and he was responsible for killing her. Thankfully Martina had stayed on with them and provided another point of continuity, a cheerful and robust presence, often more substantial than his own.
Nonetheless, although his son’s chance meeting with Leonora Gould had had no adverse effects today, if she did decide to return, he would have to move her hour forward. He studied his desk diary with its neat diagonal lines through Tuesday and Thursday afternoons which he spent in family therapy at the Marlborough and decided that next week he could offer her the morning hour he usually kept free for writing. It was the writing, alongside Robbie, which had kept him going over this last difficult year. Without them he might have gone off and done a stint in Africa with Médecins sans Frontières or some similar organisation. He smiled at his own fantasy.
It wasn’t that Daniel didn’t like his work. He was devoted to it. It was simply that in these months since Eva’s death, or perhaps earlier, when her illness was taking its final toll, he had felt he wasn’t altogether in control of his own responses. He hadn’t done particularly well today, either. She was an interesting woman this Leonora Gould. All that belligerence erupting in odd places. She obviously hated the fact that she had decided to take the step across his threshold, the little leap of faith into analysis, despite her evident hostility for his profession. He tried to think if the name Gould conjured up any articles. Her stepfather, she had said.
No, at the end things had gone slightly awry. It was when she had pressed him about Isabel Morgan.
He let the name he had kept at bay for hours invade his consciousness. He had mishandled that, too, at the last. Things should never have been allowed to take the course they had. It had all been mi
xed up with the period of Eva’s dying and he wasn’t in charge of himself. Then, too, Isabel was such a fascinating patient, the rules didn’t seem to apply. Though he had prepared himself, he had never quite believed the end would come before they were both ready for it. Nor had he counted on the manner of her return. And now she was evidently in trouble.
He covered his face with his hands and sat there for a moment, letting the full shame of that last meeting swamp him.
When the phone rang, he reached for the receiver with something like relief. Paola Webster’s resonant accented tones fell upon his ear.
‘Paola, hello. Thanks for ringing back.’
‘It’s nothing, stranger. I am happy to hear from you. Very happy. You leave me for too long.’
‘We should get together. Have a late supper. Or a drink. Sometime this week, if you can make it.’
‘OK. You have an opening at the Marlborough maybe. I’ve been waiting.’
Daniel swallowed. ‘No. It’s not that. But let’s catch up. I could manage tomorrow evening or Thursday.’
‘Wednesday would be better for me.’
‘I have a meeting on Wednesday. Sorry.’
‘Of course. How could I forget. The Institute.’ Paola spat out the site of his professional affiliation as if it were a synonym for shit.
Daniel let it ride. ‘What about tomorrow then.’
‘OK. Tomorrow is good. We go to nice restaurant I discover. In Islington.’ She pronounced it with an accent on the last syllable so that it sounded like an exotic location. ‘Euphorium. A good name for us no?’
Couldn’t be better, Daniel thought with a sinking feeling.
6
The diaphanous gown restored a radiant Imogen to womanhood. She walked towards her erratic father and placed herself between him and her jealous husband. Together they took their bows. Around them stood the malevolent queen and her spoiled son, the two brothers lost and found again, the treacherous Iachimo who, hidden in a casket, had stolen his way into Imogen’s chamber, and all the lords and ladies and Roman tribunes of Cymbeline’s court, not to mention the wordy soothsayer.
Leo, seated at the far end of the third row of the Barbican theatre, joined in the prolonged applause. It was a strange play, this Cymbeline, she reflected as the lights went up. The complications of its plot were so contorted that she was uncertain whether she had grasped any more of it than the fact that the pure, ever-faithful Imogen had been betrayed by a scheming trickster who had succeeded in convincing her husband that he had seduced her. Jealousy in Shakespeare’s late plays followed hard on the heels of love and overtook it in one fierce bound of the male imagination. She remembered Leontes in The Winter’s Tale and Lear and before that Othello and how their fear of losing control of their women or children unleashed a loss of self control, a destabilisation of the mind as well as of their regimes.
Fears and fantasies could do all that. What was it Daniel Lukas had said to her about worry? She pushed him out of her mind.
At the theatre bookshop, she stopped and bought a Cymbeline poster for Becca, together with an RSC T-shirt. Whatever her feelings about the play, it had done her good to see it. Like a laboratory rat released from a relentless treadmill into the by-ways of the city, she felt as if she had taken a sojourn from herself and the round of her obsessive fears. Maybe, just maybe, when she went back to the loft now, she would find a smiling Isabel returned to her on the whim of a master playwright.
Leo matched her pace to that of the crowds leaving the Barbican foyer. Outside they dispersed so quickly that without knowing how it had happened, she was suddenly alone on the darkened street. Her heels set up an echo behind her. So resonant was their clack, that she wanted to turn superstitiously to see whether she might not be following herself. At the corner the sight of an illuminated office block relieved her of the impulse. She wound her way towards Moorgate amidst stray papers and litter driven by the wind the canyons of these streets created and wondered again at how empty the night-time of this vast city could be. At the cemetery she broke into a run and sped the rest of the distance home. She had an odd feeling she would be pleased to see even Christopher Norfolk.
The door of the loft stood slightly ajar. For a moment she thought that her wish had been answered. She pushed it open and called out. ‘Norfolk’.
There was no answer. She was about to try again when something alerted her. Was it the lack of brightness inside or the papers oddly scattered on the floor at her feet? She picked them up. Letters addressed to Isabel. How had they found their way here? She swallowed hard and holding her breath, tiptoed along the narrow passage. The street light cast long murky shadows across the living room making the sofas loom. But everything here seemed to be as she had left it.
From beneath the study door came a bar of light. Surely she hadn’t left one on, nor shut the door. She slipped off her shoes and walked silently towards the room. With a burst of bravado, she pushed the door open and shouted, ‘Norfolk. What the hell are you doing in here?’
The sight that met her eyes made her take several steps backwards. The room looked as if it had been hit by a hurricane. A white sea of papers covered the floor. Box files floated astride them like so many broken-backed creatures. In a corner, tapes and CD’s rose into a rocky hillock, banked by photographs. Isabel’s drowning face stared out at her.
Who could have done this? Who? The question shrieked though Leo’s mind so loudly she was certain she was screaming it. But she couldn’t be because behind her in the distance, she heard a sound. She raced out into the living room. No one. There was no light either from beneath Isabel’s bedroom door or from her own which stood ajar. Her skin beneath her clothes felt icy, every pore standing to attention. She inched towards Isabel’s bedroom, prodded the door and switched on the light. No one here either, but the panel of the sliding wardrobe stood open. Shoes and boots poured from it. The drawers of the mesh rack were out, too, the clothes tumbled. On the bed lay a large upended box she had never before noticed, its contents scattered beneath it. More papers, a vertigo of papers.
Suddenly the lights went out and steely hands pushed her, shoved so hard that she was propelled against the open drawers. She screamed, sprawled forward, fell against the floor with a thud as she tried to peer back at her assailant. She had an impression of towering bulk, a gleam of hair and then the mesh stand was tumbling on top of her and her hands were over her head anticipating another blow. She waited, cowering, waited for what felt like too long before she realized that her attacker was no longer behind her. Soundlessly she extricated herself from the jumble and rubbed her legs where she could feel the bruises forming. From somewhere she heard a click.
With an abrupt recognition of the sound, she headed deliberately towards the front door. Shut. The intruder had slipped out. Only then, as she took a deep breath, did fear jolt through her. Movement became difficult. Her heart was beating too fast. She couldn’t bring herself to cross the threshold to go after him. She double locked the door, looked around her at a loss. Like a somnambulist, she slowly unbuttoned her coat, one button at a time, her fingers strangers to the act.
Gathering her wits, she moved to the front window and peered out into the night. A man was making his way round the corner. Could it be the intruder? She could see no more than a shape and a raincoat and then he was gone.
Clumsily, she retraced her steps. The bathroom door on her left was ajar. That was where he must have hidden when he had heard her on the stairs. She had walked right past him on her way in. She shuddered again and looked round the room in horror. The medicine chest had spewed up its contents. Ransacked jars and packets littered the sink. The pots which had stood on the window sill had been toppled into the bathtub. Soot brown earth speckled with tiny crushed seedlings lay heaped against the white porcelain.
Leo caught a glimpse of her own ashen face in the mirror and recoiled as if it belonged to a stranger. She sank into the nearest sofa. It made no sense. The valuables were still in pl
ace - the music system, the video and television all ranged on their usual shelves. So what had been taken? Jewellery perhaps. She forced herself up to go back into the bedroom. Isabel kept her jewellery in a black lacquered box which sat on the base of her bedside table. It was still there, seemingly untouched. She was about to reach for it, when she had second thoughts. The police. This time they wouldn’t dare to tut-tut her.
She went to use the phone in the ransacked office. It was only as she was reporting the break in, that she noticed. She shuffled the strewn papers. No. It was gone. Definitely gone. Her laptop was no longer on the desk. It made no sense.
One missing item and all this mess. The sentence played over and over in her mind like a refrain. All this mess for only one missing item. An ordinary PC laptop. Not even a particularly expensive laptop. She pulled the blind down with a sharp tug and as she did so it came to her with a sudden swift clarity. This was no ordinary breakin. Someone had come here with a specific purpose. Had come for something he already knew existed. And it was something that could be stored in computer files or existed on paper - Isabel’s letters scattered by the front door.
***
Leo sat and watched the policeman make the rounds of the loft. There were two men tonight, neither of them PC Collins. One of them had fixed her a cup of tea, asked her whether there was any brandy in the house, and had thrown a shot into the hot brew. He had told her just to sit there and try and relax while they had a good look. Leo had obeyed. Once she had told them what had happened and alerted them to the previous report about Isabel’s disappearance, she didn’t seem to have much strength for anything else.
Tears slid down her cheeks. She moved to wipe them. Her hands were shaking. Shock. That was what it was. All the adrenalin which had kept her buoyant had vanished down the plug-hole when she had splashed cold water on her face in an effort to compose herself.
‘Sorry to trouble you.’ The policeman who had made the tea perched beside her and met her eyes. ‘Can you recall whether you double locked the door before you went out?’
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