A Dark Dividing, page 24
He went to bed with his mind full of Floy’s waif-heroine who had crept into that dreadful hiding-place when the child-traders came, but who had been caught by them despite it. When he dreamed, his dreams were of dark houses and iron man-cages that might have come straight out of Hansel and Gretel, and of thin cold moons that stared soullessly down on all manner of atrocities…
And of Viola and Sorrel whose names conjured up the woodbine flowers of Shakespeare’s romances, and the scent of autumn rain and woodsmoke… And of ‘C’, who might be a man or a woman, but who might, in some unfathomable way, be connected with the ill-starred Tansy…
And of Tansy herself who might never have lived outside of Floy’s imagination.
Charlotte Quinton’s diaries:
8th February 1900
Perhaps one day all this will become dim and faded, and I shall wonder whether any of it really happened, or whether it was all simply a trick of my imagination.
But Maisie’s future is reasonably well arranged at last, and when I return to London she will stay in Weston Fferna, as housemaid in one of the neighbouring houses. They are people who own several farms and have what Mamma calls a rather slapdash attitude to house management—‘But kind, Charlotte, they are extremely kind.’ The great thing about them is they do not mind about the coming child.
Making all the arrangements has helped me to stop thinking about Floy, and about Viola and Sorrel, the daughters he never knew. Telling Mamma a little about Mortmain—just a very little—has helped even more. Mamma horrified and shocked at description of privations and the Paupers’ Room, although pointing out at same time that it cannot be made too easy for such people, Charlotte, or they will not want to work for their living at all, and then where should we be? Know that Mamma is a product of her generation and cannot, therefore, be blamed for some of her views, but ground teeth in silent fury at this outlook all the same.
Still, have managed to get her to say she will endeavour to find out about Robyn and try to do something for her. ‘And who knows but what we may be able to get the girl into good service, Charlotte.’
Cannot see the small rebellious Robyn in any kind of service, but agree it will be better for her than her present life.
‘And,’ Mamma said, as I had known she would, ‘I will also make some very stern inquiries about the governing structure of Mortmain—these things always have a governing structure, Charlotte. There may be a Trust attached to the church, you know. I believe I could consult the rector—yes, that will be a polite way to find out more. I shall invite him for a glass of sherry on Sunday.’
Mamma thinks she may even find a way to get herself on to an appropriate committee somewhere, since clearly something must be done—not acceptable for children to be ill-treated. Somewhere amidst the welter of politeness and the rector to sherry and appropriate committees, at the very least Mamma will ruffle a few feathers. Dear Mamma.
Maisie cried when I told her what I had managed to arrange, and said she would never forget what I had done for her. Gather that from here on her life is to be a model of Christian rectitude and unimpeachable morality. Cannot help thinking this will be v. boring for her (also the child, when it is born!) but perhaps less complicated in the end.
I said truth and purity very admirable to be sure, but I hoped that while Maisie was upholding these strict principles she would also feel able to uphold the story we concocted that she is a widow. If not, everybody’s reputation in shreds and tatters in the gutter, not least my mamma’s who found Maisie the situation.
Extract from diaries: July 1900
Have had news from Weston Fferna that despite exhaustive inquiries, Mamma has not been able to find Robyn, and believes the child to no longer be living in Mortmain.
Mamma writes that it is possible some of the children have been moved to some other institution—‘The laws ruling charitable institutions are very complex, even your father says so’—but I have a dreadful fear that someone discovered what they did that day, and meted out some punishment.
On a happier note, Mamma writes that Maisie was apparently safely delivered of a daughter, and mother and baby are in bouncing health.
Mamma has sent Maisie a gift of baby linen and I have done the same, sending most of the things I had bought and made, or been given, for my own babies… No good being sentimental about smocked dresses or embroidered baby-gowns, although I shed stupid tears over them before briskly packing them into brown paper and taking them to Postal Offices.
Cannot help feeling that straightforward vulgar coinage would have been of more use to the daisie, but although Edward is not precisely mean he does scrutinize the household accounts very closely. Toyed with idea of putting in false entry—purchase of gown or hat—and then sending the money to Maisie by postal order, but regretfully abandoned it, not because have any scruples about such a deception, but because Edward likely to ask indulgently to see gown or hat. Oh why cannot ladies have their own income, completely private and separate from their husbands!
However, Edward not quite so sanguine these days, in fact quite worried over trade situation in Europe. If you ask him, Germany is widening her markets at the expense of rivals, and England will do better to bide her time.
Have absolutely no idea what he means (am not entirely sure he does, either), but do know that he is starting to sound exactly like Father.
Cannot imagine that I will ever be able to forget what happened inside Mortmain House—and think I must continue to try to find out what became of Robyn and the other children, although this may be difficult, since Edward not likely to look kindly on wife making frequent trips to Welsh Marches. But I shall try my hardest.
What I shall never forget is the look in Floy’s eyes when he talked about the choice between the ivory gate and the one of burnished horn. He despised me for choosing the ivory gate, of course. But is it really the choice of delusions and falseness? What about the duty one owes to other people?
Those children—Robyn and Anthony and all the others—made a choice that afternoon, although they would not have seen it in terms of Virgilian philosophic poetry. Would not have seen it in those terms myself if it had not been for Floy, who taught me so many things, and opened up doors for my mind that no one else could ever have done, least of all Edward.
Those children saw the killing of the man who stole their friends in such very simple terms. They knew him to be evil—they knew exactly what he and his kind were doing—and so they punished him in order to halt the evil and save their friends. There’s a rather frightening artlessness about that.
But if I can find a way to outwit Edward again and trace Robyn and her friends, then I shall do it. All the conventional things—charity dances, luncheons at two guineas a head, seats on committees—do not seem to bear much relevance to Mortmain or its evils, and I am back with the idea of a social revolution to temper mankind’s cruelties.
Whether I am able to find, and help, those children or not, I will never forget them, any more than I will ever forget Viola and Sorrel—Floy’s moss-rose and bluebell daughters, who are buried so incongruously in a North London cemetery, but whose insubstantial ghosts will always be with me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
IT WAS ALMOST seven o’clock on Monday evening when Angelica performed one of her lightning quick-changes in the tiny office at the top of the Bloomsbury house.
‘Because there really isn’t time to go home to change, and I do think it’s far-sighted of me to keep a few outfits here, don’t you?’
‘Very.’ Simone was bent over her desk, trying the effect of different transparencies, one over another.
‘You’re not staying on, are you, Sim? It’s awfully late.’
‘I’ll stay for a while, I think. I’d like to get a bit further with this if I can. Or at least get an idea where it’s going.’ A few tenuous threads of ideas were starting to form in her mind and if she did not pin them down tonight she might lose sight of them altogether. ‘So don’t lock the downstairs door; I’ll pull it to when I go. I’ll set the alarm as well.’
‘All right. It’s Mrs Whatnot’s night to clean anyway, so she’ll be in later.’
They did not open Thorne’s to the public on Mondays, but unless Simone was on a photographing trip—what Angelica rather grandly called a field trip—she usually came in. There was generally something to be done: Angelica dealt with most of the actual administration, but Simone often had proofs to be touched up, or developing to deal with. She quite often used a digital camera nowadays, but she still liked the old click-and-develop darkroom method as well. It gave you more of a sense of creating your work.
From the other side of the room, Angelica said, ‘Can I look at what you’re doing yet, or d’you want to muse on your own for a bit longer?’
‘Muse for a bit longer if you don’t mind.’ Simone said this a bit brusquely, because she was always defensive about her work when it was a new project.
‘OK,’ said Angelica carelessly. ‘Listen, does it look tarty if I leave two buttons unfastened on this outfit, or shall I just undo the one?’
‘Turn round so I can see—Oh yes, two does look a bit—Just the one undone I’d have.’
‘That’s what I thought.’ Angelica fastened up one of the errant buttons, and then began hunting for earrings in her desk drawer.
‘Where are you going tonight? Oh, that Hanover Street place, aren’t you?’
‘Yes. Rather fun. But you know, I still think you were the one that Harry was really interested in. He talked to you for such hours at the opening, didn’t he?’
‘Just business stuff.’ Simone would have been torn into pieces by wild horses galloping in different directions rather than admit that she also had thought Harry Fitzglen had been interested in her. ‘I don’t really go for those glowering Heathcliff looks, in fact if you want the truth I don’t think I could have coped with him. I thought he was a bit alarming.’
‘Oh, pooh, nobody’s alarming. All you need is a little panache.’
It was all very well for Angelica, who was disgustingly well-off, despite the scandals and the frenetic socializing, and who was outrageously attractive into the bargain, and loaded with enough panache for a regiment. Also, it was not very likely that Angelica had had to cope with darknesses or secrets much, because, as Angelica always informed everyone, her life was an open book, my dears, and everyone was welcome to know all the things she had done.
But no one knew the things that Simone had done, and that was the problem with getting close to people, well, with getting close to men if you wanted to be exact. If you got too close to a man you might relax and give things away. You might do it in an unguarded moment, not realizing your error until it was too late, or you might even do it deliberately, wanting to tell him all about your life and your feelings. Thinking, If you do love me, you won’t care what I might have done or what I might once have been. Foolish in the extreme, of course, and potentially fatal, as well.
Simone had come close to being this foolish two or three times at university, and had been panic-stricken to suddenly find herself on the brink of making disastrous disclosures. The world was a judgemental place and it was best not to trust anyone, which was why Simone tended to back out of relationships if they threatened to get too intense. It had earned her a name for being cold and even a bit prim—and one boyfriend had accused her of being a prick-teaser—but although these names were hateful, there were far worse names you could be called. Freak. Murderess.
So with an air of putting a troublesome matter in its place, she said firmly, ‘Anyway, I’m much too busy to be bothered with men at the moment. The stuff for the new exhibition—’
‘Oh, rot, darling,’ said Angelica, whom nobody would ever call cold or prim (or, heaven forfend, a prick-teaser!). ‘Nobody should ever be as busy as all that.’
Simone had got up from her desk to put some coffee on to filter. ‘I suppose we could ask your journalist to come along to the second exhibition, couldn’t we?’ she said off-handedly. ‘For some publicity.’
‘He isn’t my journalist.’ But the cat-smile showed briefly.
‘No? That notch on your bedpost’s just woodworm, I suppose?’
‘I don’t know about notches on bedposts, but I have to say all that damn-your-eyes insolence is vastly attractive. Like Sydney Carton, you know. Going scowlingly to the scaffold in Darnay’s place, caring for no man and no man caring for him.’
‘You never cease to amaze me,’ said Simone, who had had to think for a moment who Sydney Carton might be, and who, despite the tortoiseshell glasses that appeared from time to time, had not expected Angelica to be on quoting terms with the works of Charles Dickens.
‘Well, I’m not precisely the thinking man’s crumpet, darling, but I’m not exactly untutored. And insolence transfers very well into bed. All that energy.’
Simone said, ‘I don’t want to know,’ and this time Angelica smiled the smile that made her look like an Italian madonna with a disreputable secret, and said dulcetly that there were some things you never told.
Some things you never told…
Such as murder—the kind of macabre, unintended murder that might have taken place inside a dark old house with revengeful ghosts gossiping in the corners, and a disused well breathing its ancient stench into your face.
But you cannot murder a ghost…
For at least a month after that day in Mortmain Simone had listened carefully to the TV and radio news, because despite what Mother had said and despite that second eerie expedition they had made to Mortmain together, she was still half-expecting to hear about a police search for a missing child. She could watch the six o’clock news each evening if she wanted; it was not a big deal either way, but Mother was quite pleased if she did watch it. It was a good thing to know what was going on in the world, she said, even though a lot of it was depressing. Simone did not understand everything although some of the things were pretty interesting.
But there was nothing at all about a missing girl in the Welsh Marches. There were no trembly-voiced people begging for their daughter or sister or niece to be returned to them, and there were no police appeals for information, or photographs saying, Have you seen this child? After a while she did not listen absolutely every night, and after a while the horror faded a little.
But the memory did not fade and the idea that the dead Sonia had tried to cling on to life using her twin did not fade either. It stayed with Simone, vividly and sometimes disturbingly, and the concept of children dying young and unfulfilled stayed with her as well.
In her final Slade year she composed a series of black-and-white-and-grey studies. They were not meant to imply any particular country or culture or time, but each shot had a faint, just-discernible touch of the macabre and the tragic, and each had the theme of lost children or lost childhoods.
One suggested ragged Victorian match-sellers who froze to death on New Year’s Eve—but there was a faint overlay of a modern-day Centrepoint and the corner of a copy of the Big Issue—while another was a rather eerie setting of a lonely Christmas night, with a half-decorated fir tree and gaily-wrapped presents that would wait in vain for children to open them. A third showed shoes that forced their wearer to dance through frozen landscapes and ice-rimed forests into exhaustion, and whether the shoes were ordinary red shoes, or whether they were red from the blood of their wearer was left to the imagination of the viewer. But the shoes were not classical ballet shoes as in the Andersen tale, they were modern trainers, plastered with designer labels.
It was a series of images that had startled Simone’s course tutor who said they were brilliant but dreadfully dark, but it had been the series that had won her the coveted Fox Talbot Award, and brought her to the notice of Angelica Thorne who was surprisingly sharp and businesslike beneath the froth and frivolity, and who was just entering her patron-of-the-arts incarnation.
And so, barely a year out of university, Simone had come to the Bloomsbury house with its oddly comforting atmosphere and its feeling that there were stored-away memories, and that those memories might be nearer to the surface than you realized… And that if you could only open the right door or turn a key at the right moment you would unlock those memories and those echoes and see them all come tumbling out around you.
But the memories must be kept in place, both in this house and everywhere else. The past must not intrude: it did not matter and it must not be allowed to matter.
Simone pushed the memories and the echoes firmly away and got up from her desk. Angelica had long since departed for her date with Harry Fitzglen, and the coffee had finished filtering ages ago. She poured herself a mugful and stood at the little window for a moment, looking down into the street. It was dark now, and it was raining as well; she could see the long snaking bead-necklaces of car headlights that were London’s perpetual rush hour.
She liked being on her own in this house, and she liked the feeling of expectancy that occasionally seemed to pass through the rooms as night fell, almost as if the house was anticipating the evening ahead in the way it might have done years ago when it had been an ordinary private house, and people had come here. What kind of people had they been? Would it be possible to find out? She remembered that Harry had said he would try to disinter some of the house’s history, although it was always likely that he would become so entangled with Angelica that he would completely forget about it.
She went back to her desk, and switched on the small CD player, scanning the little stock of CDs she kept here. When she was working she liked playing music to match the current project. Prokofiev might fit the mood tonight, or maybe Mahler—yes, Mahler would be good. She was quite keen on his music; she had seen the Visconti Death in Venice film during her final year at the Slade, and had loved the music as much as the film and had gone on from there. She thought she would play the Sixth tonight; it had that terrific second movement in which you could hear the rhythmic machinery of the factories and the furnace-lit foundries of the late nineteenth century, so that you conjured up images of the machines themselves, unstoppable and soulless and altogether Salvador-Dali-nightmarish.
