Incarnate (13 page)

His voice was soft and gentle. It made her think of a calm, moonlit sea. He stood up. He was taller than she was. Timothy had been; for the first time in years she didn’t feel the need to stoop. He was reaching out to her with his long fingers, white and smooth as marble, like his face. Either he was bald or he had the highest forehead she had ever seen. She stepped forward to the black table, and then she felt as if she were falling into a well. The top of the table was a black mirror, though she couldn’t see him in it, nor herself. If she fell she would never stop.

His hands caught hers across the table. His fingers were as cool as they had looked. She thought of her mother’s cool fingers, stroking her forehead when she’d had a fever.

His hands and hers were reflected in the mirror now—it must have been a trick of the light that had made her unable to see them before—and she had an impression of restrained strength, of a deep calm that could be hers. “Will you sit down?” he said. “I can help.”

She was scarcely aware of sitting down, since his face stayed level with hers all the way. She wondered what the smell was that reminded her of fallen plaster, she wondered how large the room was—and then she was aware only of him. When she made to speak, he shook his head and smiled. “You need tell me nothing,” he said.

She had no idea how long he gazed into her eyes. She felt oddly that he was gazing down into the mirror as well. Peace seemed to be flowing into her through his fingers, which were still holding hers. At last he said. “You are troubled because someone else is.”

“Yes.”

“She has lost someone dear.”

“Yes,” she said, and felt as if she didn’t need to speak, that her secrets were passing to him through her fingertips in exchange for peace.

“She is unable to accept the death because it seems so pointless.”

She hadn’t thought of that, but it must be true, not only because Doreen and Harry had been planning their second honeymoon, to see a few of the places they had always felt they couldn’t afford, but because Harry’s death had been so unnecessary. It seemed impossible that he could have lost his way in the streets near the boardinghouse, that he could have been so preoccupied that he had stepped in front of a lorry. “Yes,” she said, since the man called Sage appeared to be waiting.

“She would accept it if she heard of him.”

“I suppose so.”

“You can do so, you want to, but you are afraid.”

Could he read all her secrets? Yes, she wanted to, but the idea terrified her. She felt like a blind person who was horribly afraid to see. Even his peace couldn’t reassure her now; she was afraid where it might lead.

He must have sensed that she couldn’t speak. “There is nothing to fear,” he said. “You can help her. Only you can.”

If that was true, she didn’t want to know. It wasn’t only dreaming that she feared, it was going to London. Could she invite Doreen to stay with her for Christmas? But then she might have to dream. “I can’t,” she pleaded. “I’m afraid of where she lives. I can’t go there, I don’t know why.”

A frown passed across his forehead, a single ripple. “Perhaps you have painful memories.”

Of course she had. Timothy had come from London. He’d worked at Harrod’s and all over London there were places that would remind her of him. She was struggling within herself, for the man called Sage was robbing her of all her reasons not to go to Doreen, making her afraid that she would have to go. Suddenly the dark around her seemed as limitless as the dark in the mirror. Just as she thought of pulling her hands free of his, he took hold of them more firmly and looked down into the mirror. He gazed and gripped her hands until she had to look down too, however afraid she was. Down there in the dark, so distant that she couldn’t understand how she could make it out, was Harry’s face.

She would have fled, if the man called Sage hadn’t been holding her. His peace was flooding her, washing away her panic, and she saw that Harry’s face was luminous; Harry’s eyes were gazing into hers, telling her something beyond words, something of what she had always forgotten when she woke from her dreams. The light that was his face was growing brighter; every feature was microscopically perfect, made of light that was still brightening, until she had to close her eyes.

She didn’t know how long she sat there, blinded. If the long cool fingers hadn’t kept hold of hers, she felt she would have been lost forever in the dark. When she opened her eyes, Harry’s face had gone. She gazed at the man called Sage. “You see what you can do,” he said. “You must not waste that. Few have your vision.”

She felt drained, almost weightless, but no longer afraid. The vision of Harry’s face was an aspect of the peace that had washed away her fear, and she wished she could see it again. “Will you help your friend now?” he said.

She said “Yes” without thinking, from deep in her peace. But had she been coaxed into giving a promise that she would be unable to break? How would she feel when she went away from him into the dark? “Can I come and see you again?” she said, trying not to be nervous.

“I think you will find there is no need. I shall be moving on. I’ve finished here. There is no reason for you to be afraid,” he said, and paused. “Should you ever need me, perhaps you will see me again.”

She realized that was a dismissal, and she let go of his hands and stood up. In the unlit corridor she looked back. He raised one hand in a gesture of farewell and of promise, too, she hoped.

She felt peaceful, if she would let herself do so. She didn’t even realize she was walking away from the promenade until suddenly she found herself in sight of the locked entrance of the Tower, almost home. She let herself into her rooms and made for the phone, clapping her hands to chase Grimalkin away from her knitting, which he’d pawed out of the basket, and back to his cat food. This time she wouldn’t try to know better than the advice she had been given. Why had she been afraid to go to London? If there was one thing she could be sure of, it was that she was unable to predict her own future.

She dialed quickly and waited while the phone rang and rang, until she began to grow anxious for Doreen. Then there was silence. “Hello?” Doreen said.

She sounded hopeless, lifeless, unconvinced that the phone was worth answering. “It’s Freddy, Doreen,” Freda said at once, seeing Harry’s luminous face and the eyes of the man called Sage, wondering if the vision had come from those eyes rather than from the dark mirror. It didn’t matter, the vision was part of her now, if only she could communicate it to Doreen. She must communicate that peace. “I’m coming to stay with you for Christmas,” she said. “Keep your chin up until I get there. You won’t be alone much longer.”

12

T
HE YOUNG WOMAN
who played the victim of the corporal punishment film couldn’t get a university place or a job. Martin interviewed her while the film was being made, since he was given so little time. By no means all of the corporal punishment was simulated. Terry Mace grew furious when the woman directing the film, who was a partner in a firm of solicitors whose office was disguised as a headmaster’s study that Sunday, refused to talk to Martin for the camera.

“About time you stopped chasing awards and got back to making films you care about,” he said afterward to Martin, and Molly knew she must get Martin on his own to find out what had really been troubling him.

At Kensington High Street baskets of flowers like vegetable spiders hung under the roof of the station arcade, beneath the frosted glass that the afternoon sky turned to gold. Martin Wallace lived opposite, in a turn-of-the-century block of mansion flats white as china. As they went up in the lift, a cage of polished bars and mirrors, Molly saw the buttons for the servants’ bells next to each door, brass sockets gleaming. His apartment was on the top floor, six rooms with a bell push in every one, antique furniture as elaborate as the plaster vegetation that sprouted all the lights, a four-poster bed in the bedroom. “VIP treatment from MTV,” Martin said as if he didn’t know what else to say. “I just hope I’m worth it.”

“You know you are.”

“With your help, maybe.” He hurried across the densely carpeted hall and opened the outer door. “Come up and see the view.”

He pushed the bar on the door at the top of the last flight of stairs and they stepped onto the roof. The cold was exhilarating. They made their way between the skylights and the craning insect aerials to the edge. A silenced crowd streamed homeward along Kensington High Street, and the muted brass of traffic drifted up. The rooftops were a different city—weathercocks dozing for the moment among the turrets and highbrow windows and rooftop greenhouses; flags stirring among the shrubbery of a roof garden. Beyond the sunset roofs, Chelsea looked carved out Of amber. A breeze lifted a hint of bells from the spire of St. Mary Abbot’s. Molly gazed down at the coping stones above the apartment windows. “They look as if you could just step down to the street,” she said, and suddenly she was swaying at the edge of the roof, flailing her arms. Martin grabbed her shoulder. “Nearly lost you there,” he said.

She was squeezing his waist as if she would never let go. Her grip seemed to mean paragraphs she couldn’t speak: I want you to know what I am, I don’t want to be alone with it, I
would
tell you except I’m afraid that would bring it all back, don’t let go, don’t say anything… . Then he turned and kissed her. They kissed hungrily, and quite a time passed before they thought to move back. Then they were on the stairs, in the flat and the bedroom. They undressed mutually and urgently and made love so fiercely that the four-poster canopy shook.

Afterward they lay embracing. His penis was quite small, she noticed now. He grinned at it as if it were an oddity he was rather fond of and told her about the girls it had taken aback: Marsha at high school who’d held it and complained, “Is that all you’ve got?” as if it were a donation to a charity, Sharon who’d seemed to regard it as the best you could expect at a Baptist university. Molly laughed, and they made love again, more gently, and she knew that if she told anyone it would be Martin, but not now. She felt so safe, drifting away into the evening dark, going to sleep in his arms… . Suddenly she jerked awake: she might dream if she fell asleep now—she might dream of
him.
It made her panic. She groped for the light switch and her clothes.

He’d promised her dinner but she didn’t feel up to it now. Eventually, to his amusement, she managed to persuade him to go down and get her a Big Mac. As soon as she’d eaten the hamburger out of its squeaky container, she wiped her mouth and kissed him. “You don’t mind if I go now, do you? I’ve things to do at home.”

“Sure.” But he seemed disappointed. “Go ahead.”

“it isn’t true, I haven’t. I just don’t want to sleep here tonight, all right?”

He smiled wistfully and took her face in his hands. “I understand.”

In the frosty High Street a car drove over a McDonald’s carton that crunched like ice. Plaques glittered on houses in Holland Street, where the ladies in waiting at Kensington Palace had lived two hundred years ago. Smells of cooking hung around Queen Elizabeth College, a peacock cried sleepily in Holland Park. She went quickly down the steps to her flat, trying not to feel disappointed by knowing nobody was there.

She’d taken a shower and made herself coffee before she remembered Martin’s TV interview. Had he been hoping she might watch it with him? There he was now, talking to Leon about his work with a kind of shy self-questioning enthusiasm. She wondered if he were watching by himself or if he would be too embarrassed. Had she simply been afraid that if she dreamed she would have to tell him? She switched off the television and went to bed, hoping to sleep.

Soon the dark began to shift and whisper, but that was only rain; she heard the splash of a passing car, imagined rain flooding down her steps. The rain was outside, her flat wasn’t underwater. That was just a momentary dream, like the pimply face that was on the pillow when she turned over, the face of the man who’d followed her in Soho, the face that pressed into hers whenever she closed her eyes. She floundered out of bed away from it, the blankets clinging to her then floating away through the room, she swam to the door and dragged at it, but the weight of the water that filled the room was too much for her. If her parents were out there they must have drowned by now, but the thought drifted away into dreamless sleep.

She toweled herself briskly after her morning shower to get rid of the damp, shivery feeling. She dropped bread into the toaster and switched on the percolator, then, on impulse, called her parents. “Hello, sweetheart,” her mother said. “Do you mind if I call you back? We’re flooded out this morning. Burst pipe.”

At least it had actually been raining. Water was still dripping from the steps and snaking over the windscreens of parked cars. A woman on the corner by the estate agent’s looked as if she had been standing there all night; the shoulders of her hooded coat were black, her gray hair looked like fluid congealing in the hood. Molly dodged around her, thinking that her dream was nothing special, she could have guessed that her parents’ home might have suffered a burst pipe, it was so cold in Devon just now. All the same, she wanted to see Martin. She had just passed the woman in the hooded coat when the woman grabbed her arm.

She let go at once and looked bewildered. For an instant she’d made Molly feel they knew each other, but the thin anxious face seemed wholly unfamiliar. She was holding a sodden street map, the pages stuck together in a solid mass. “Are you lost?” Molly said.

“I might as well be.” She seemed to be trying to place Molly. “I’m looking for a job.”

“I see what you mean,” Molly said, thinking of the unemployment figures. “Anything in particular?”

“I was a librarian.” She frowned and added, “I still am.”

Darkness loomed over them, the sounds of Bayswater Road were fading. “You ought to be able to find something, then,” Molly said.

“I need to work near here.” It sounded like a plea. “You wouldn’t know where there’s a job, would you?”