The ghosts chilled his skin with their disapproval, but Immacolata was quite able to protect her inviolability. She turned, her eyes raging at his presumption. He immediately removed his hand from her arm, his fingers tingling. He would count the minutes until he had a private moment in which to put them to his lips.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I was concerned.’
A voice intervened. The receptionist had emerged from his room, a copy of Sporting Life in hand.
‘Can I be of help?’ he offered.
‘No, no …’ said Shadwell.
The receptionist’s eyes were not on him, however, but on Immacolata.
‘Touch of heat stroke, is it?’ he said.
‘Maybe,’ said Shadwell. Immacolata had moved to the bottom of the stairs, out of the receptionist’s enquiring gaze. ‘Thank you for your concern –’
The receptionist made a face, and returned to his armchair. Shadwell went to Immacolata. She had found the shadows; or the shadows had found her.
‘What happened?’ he said. ‘Was it just the sun?’
She didn’t look at him, but she deigned to speak.
‘I felt the Fugue …’ she said, so softly he had to hold his breath to catch her words ‘… then something else.’
He waited for further news from her, but none came. Then, as he was about to break the silence, she said:
‘At the back of my throat …’ She swallowed, as if to dislodge some remembered bitterness ‘… the Scourge …’
The Scourge? Had he heard her correctly?
Either Immacolata sensed his doubt, or shared it, for she said:
‘It was there, Shadwell.’
and when she spoke even her extraordinary self-control couldn’t quite tame the flutter in her voice.
‘Surely you’re mistaken.’
She made a tiny shake of her head.
‘It’s dead and gone,’ he said.
Her face could have been chiselled from stone. Only her lips moved, and he longed for them, despite the thoughts they shaped.
‘A power like that doesn’t die.’ she said. ‘It can’t ever die. It sleeps. It waits.’
‘What for? Why?
‘Till the Fugue wakes, maybe,’ she said.
Her eyes had lost their gold; become silvery. Motes of the menstruum, turning like dust in a sun-beam, dropped from her lashes and evaporated inches from his face. He’d never seen her like this before, so close to exposing her feelings. The spectacle of her vulnerability aroused him beyond words. His prick was so hard it ached. She was apparently dead to his arousal however; or else chose to ignore it. The Magdalene, the blind sister, was not so indifferent. She, Shadwell knew, had an appetite for what a man might spill, and horrid purposes to put it to. Even now he saw her form coagulating in a recess in the wall, one hunger from scalp to sole.
‘I saw a wilderness,’ Immacolata said, calling Shadwell’s attention from the Magdalene’s advances. ‘Bright sun. Terrible sun. The emptiest place on earth.’
‘And that’s where the Scourge is now?’
She nodded. ‘It’s sleeping. I think … it’s forgotten itself.’
‘It’ll stay that way, then, won’t it?’ Shadwell replied. ‘Who the hell’s going to wake it?’
His words failed to convince even himself.
‘Look –’ he said, ‘ – we’ll find the Fugue and sell it before the Scourge can so much as roll over. We haven’t come so far to stop now.’
Immacolata said nothing. Her eyes were still fixed on that nowhere she’d sighted, or tasted – or both – minutes earlier.
Only very dimly did Shadwell comprehend what forces were at work here. Finally, he was only a Cuckoo – a human being – and that limited his vision; for which fact, as now, he was sometimes grateful.
One thing he did comprehend: the Fugue trailed legends. In the years of their search he’d heard it reported so many ways, from cradle-song to death-bed confession, and he’d long ago given up attempting to sort fact from fiction. All that mattered was that the many and the mighty longed for that place, spoke of it in their prayers, without knowing – most of them – that it was real; or had been. And what a profit he would turn when he had that dream on the block; there had never been a sale its like, or ever would be again. They could not give up now. Not for fear of something lost in time and sleep.
‘It knows. Shadwell,’ Immacolata said. ‘Even in its sleep, it knows.’
Had he had the words to persuade her from her fear she would have been contemptuous of them. Instead, he played the pragmatist.
‘The sooner we find the carpet and dispose of it the happier we’ll all be,’ he said.
The response seemed to stir her from the wilderness.
‘Maybe in a while,’ she replied, her eyes flickering towards him for the first time since they’d stepped off the street. ‘Maybe then we’ll go looking.’
All sign of the menstruum had abruptly vanished. The moment of doubt had passed, and the old certainty was back. She would pursue the Fugue to the end, he knew, as they had always planned. No rumour – even of the Scourge – would deflect her from her malice.
‘We may lose the trail if we don’t hurry.’
‘I doubt that,’ she said. ‘We’ll wait. Until the heat dies down.’
Ah, so this was to be his punishment for that ill-considered touch. It was his heat she made mocking reference to, not that of the city outside. He would be obliged to wait her pleasure, as he had waited before, and bear his stripes in silence. Not just because she alone could track the Fugue by the rhythm of its woven life, but because to wait another hour in her company, bathing in the scent of her breath, was an agony he would gladly endure.
For him it was a ritual of crime and punishment which would keep him hard for the rest of the day.
For her, the power his desire lent her remained a diverting curiosity. Furnaces, after all, grew cold if left unstoked. Even stars went out after a millennium. But the lust of Cuckoos, like so much else about that species, defied all the rules. The less it was fed, the hotter it became.
V
BEFORE THE DARK
1
n all, Suzanna had probably met her maternal grandmother less than a dozen times. Even as a child, before she’d fully understood the words, she’d been taught that the old woman was not to be trusted, though she could not remember ever hearing a reason offered as to why. The mud had stuck however. Though in her early adulthood – she was now 24 – she had learned to view her parents’ prejudices with a critical eye, and come to suspect that whatever their anxiety regarding her grandmother it was likely to be perfectly irrational – she could nevertheless not entirely forget the mythology that had grown up around Mimi Laschenski.
The very name was a stumbling block. To the ear of a child it sounded more like a faery-tale curse than a name. And indeed there had been much about the woman that supported such a fiction. Suzanna remembered Mimi as being small, with skin that was always slightly jaundiced, her black hair (which with hindsight, was probably dyed) drawn back tightly from a face which she doubted capable of a smile. Perhaps Mimi had reason for grief. Her first husband, who had been some sort of circus performer, had disappeared before the Great War; run away, the family gossip went, because Mimi was such a harridan. The second husband, Suzanna’s grandfather, had died of lung cancer in his early forties; smoked himself to death. Since then the old woman had lived in increasingly eccentric isolation, alienated from her children and grand-children alike, in a house in Liverpool; a house to which – at Mimi’s enigmatic request – Suzanna was about to pay a long-delayed visit.
As she drove North she turned over her memories of Mimi, and of that house. She recalled it being substantially larger than her parents’ place in Bristol had been; and darker. A house that had not been painted since before the Flood, a stale house; a house in mourning. And the more she remembered, the gloomier she became.
In the private story-book of her head this trip back to Mimi?
??s was a return to the mire of childhood; a reminder not of blissful, careless years, but of an anxious, blinkered state from which adulthood had liberated her. And Liverpool had been that state’s metropolis; a city of perpetual dusk, where the air smelt of cold smoke and a colder river. When she thought of it she was a child again, and frightened of dreams.
Of course she’d shrugged off those fears years ago. Here she was, at the wheel of her car, perfect mistress of herself, driving in the fast lane with the sun on her face. What hold could those old anxieties have over her now? Yet as she drove she found herself drawing to her keepsakes from her present life, like talismans to keep that city at bay.
She thought of the studio she’d left behind in London, and the pots she’d left to be glazed and fired when – in just a little while – she got back. She remembered Finnegan, and the flirtatious dinner she’d had with him two nights ago. She thought of her friends, robust and articulate people, any of a dozen of whom she’d trust her life and sanity to. With so much clarity to arm her, she could surely re-tread the paths of her childhood and remain untainted. She travelled a broader, brighter highway now.
Yet the memories were still potent.
Some, like her picturing of Mimi and the house, were images she’d recalled before. One in particular, however, emerged from some hidden niche in her head, unvisited since the day she’d sealed it up there.
The episode didn’t come, as many had, piece by piece. It flashed before her all at once, in astonishing particularity –
She was six. They were in Mimi’s house, she and her mother, and it was November – wasn’t it always? – drear and cold. They’d come on one of their rare visits to Gran’ma, a duty which father had always been spared.
She saw Mimi now, sitting in an armchair near to a fire that barely warmed the soot in the grate. Her face – soured and sad to the brink of tragedy – was pale with powder, the brows meticulously plucked, the eyes glittering even in the dour light through the lace curtains.
She spoke; and her soft syllables drowned out the din of the motorway.
‘Suzanna…’
Addressed from the past, she listened.
‘… I’ve something for you.’
The child’s heart had fallen from its place, and thumped around in her belly.
‘Say thank you. Suzie.’ her mother chided.
The child did as she was told.
‘It’s upstairs.’ Mimi said, ‘in my bedroom. You can go and get it for yourself, can’t you? It’s all wrapped up, at the bottom of the tall-boy.’
‘Go on. Suzie.’
She felt her mother’s hand on her arm, pushing her away towards the door.
‘Hurry up now.’
She glanced at her mother, then back at Mimi. There was no mercy to be had from either: they would have her up those stairs, and no protest would mellow them. She left the room, and went to the bottom of the stairs. They were a mountain-face before her; and the darkness at the summit a terror she tried not to contemplate. In any other house she would not have been so fearful. But this was Mimi’s house; Mimi’s darkness.
She climbed, her hand clinging to the bannister, certain that something terrible awaited her on every stair. But she reached the top without being devoured, and crossed the landing to her grandmother’s bedroom.
The drapes were barely parted: what little light fell between was the colour of old stone. A clock ticked on the mantelpiece, at a quarter the speed of her pulse. On the wall above the clock, gazing down the length of the head-high bed was an oval portrait photograph of a man in a suit that was buttoned up to the neck. And to the left of the mantelpiece, across a carpet that killed her footsteps, was the tall-boy, twice her size and more.
She went to it quickly, determined – now that she was in the room – to do the deed and be out before the ticking had its way with her and slowed her heart ‘til it stopped.
Reaching up, she turned the chilly handle. The door opened a little. From inside bloomed the smell of moth-balls, shoe-leather and lavender water. Ignoring the gowns that hung in the shadows she plunged her hand amongst the boxes and tissue paper at the bottom of the tall-boy, hoping to chance upon the present.
In her haste, she pushed the door wide – and something wild-eyed lurched out of the darkness towards her. She screamed. It mocked her, screaming back in her face. Then she was running towards the door, tripping on the carpet in her flight, before hurtling downstairs. Her mother was in the hallway –
‘What is it, Suzie?
There were no words to tell. Instead she threw herself into her mother’s arms – though, as ever, there was that moment when they seemed to hesitate before choosing to hold her – and sobbed that she wanted to go home. Nor would she be placated, even after Mimi had gone upstairs and returned saying something about the mirror in the tall-boy door.
They’d left the house soon after that, and, as far as she could now recall, Suzanna had never since entered Mimi’s bedroom. As for the gift, it had not been mentioned again.
That was the bare bones of the memory, but there was much else – perfumes; sounds; nuances of light – that fleshed those bones. The incident, once exhumed, had more authority than events both more recent and ostensibly more significant. She could not now conjure – nor would ever, she suspected – the face of the boy to whom she’d given her virginity, but she could remember the smell from Mimi’s tall-boy as though it were still in her lungs.
Memory was so strange.
And stranger still, the letter, at the beck of which she was making this journey.
It was the first missive she’d received from her grandmother for over a decade. That fact alone would have been sufficient to have her foresake the studio and come. But the message itself, spindly scrawlings on an air-mail paper page, had lent her further speed. She’d left London as soon as the summons had arrived, as if she’d known and loved the woman who’d written it for half a hundred years.
Suzanna, it had begun. Not Dear nor Dearest. Simply:
Suzanna,
Forgive my scribbles. I’m sick at the moment. I feel weak some hours, and not so weak others. Who knows how I’ll feel tomorrow?
That’s why I’m writing to you now, Suzanna, because I’m afraid of what may happen.
Will you come to see me, at the house? We have very much to say to each other, I think. Things I didn’t want to say, but now I have to.
None of this will make much sense to you. I know, but I can’t be plain, not in a letter. There are good reasons.
Please come. Things are different to the way I thought they’d be. We can talk, the way we should have talked many years ago.
My love to you, Suzanna.
Mimi.
The letter was like a midsummer lake. Its surface placid, but beneath?; such darkness. Things are different to the way I thought they’d be. Mimi had written. What did she mean? That life was over too soon, and her sunlit youth had contained no clue as to how bitter mortality would be?
The letter had been delayed, through the vagaries of the postal service, by over a week. When, upon getting it, she’d rung Mimi’s house she’d received only the number disconnected tone. Leaving the pots she was making unfinished, she had packed a bag and driven North.
2
She went straight to Rue Street, but number eighteen was empty. Sixteen was also deserted, but at the next house a florid woman by the name of Violet Pumphrey was able to offer some explanation. Mimi had fallen sick a few days earlier, and was now in Sefton General Hospital, close to death. Her creditors, which included the Gas and Electricity Boards, and the Council, in addition to a dozen suppliers of food and drink, had immediately made moves to claim some recompense.
‘Like vultures, they were,’ said Mrs Pumphrey, ‘and her not even dead yet. It’s shameful. There they were, taking everything they could lay their hands on. Mind you, she was difficult. Hope you don’t mind my being plain, love? But she was. Kept herself hidden away in the house most of the time. It
was a bloody fortress. That’s why they waited, see? ‘til she was peggin’ out. If they’d tried to get in with her there they’d have still been tryin’.’
Had they taken the tall-boy? Suzanna idly wondered. Thanking Mrs Pumphrey for her help, she went back to have another look at number eighteen – its roof so covered in bird-shit it looked to have had its own private blizzard – then went on to the hospital.
3
The nurse wore her show of compassion indifferently well. ‘I’m afraid Mrs Laschenski’s very sick. Are you a close relative?’
‘I’m her grand-daughter. Has anybody else been to see her?’
‘Not that I know of. There really isn’t that much point. She’s had a major stroke, Miss – ’
‘Parrish. Suzanna Parrish.’
‘Your grandmother’s unconscious most of the time, I’m afraid.’
‘I see.’
‘So please don’t expect too much.’
The nurse led her down a short corridor to a room that was so quiet Suzanna could have heard a petal drop, but that there were no flowers. She wasn’t unfamiliar with death rooms; her mother and father had died three years before, within six months of each other. She recognized the scent, and the hush, as soon as she stepped inside.
‘She’s not been awake today,’ said the nurse, as she stood back to let Mimi’s visitor approach the bed.
Suzanna’s first thought was that there’d been some colossal error. This couldn’t be Mimi. This poor woman was too frail; too white. The objection was on the tip of her tongue when she realized that the error was hers. Though the hair of the woman in the bed was so thin that her scalp gleamed through, and the skin of her face was draped slackly on her skull like wet muslin, this was, nevertheless, Mimi. Robbed of power; reduced by some malfunction of nerve and muscle to this unwelcome passivity; but still Mimi.