Incarnate (20 page)

“What do you mean?”

“You know perfectly well what I mean, or you should. You were grateful enough to have her as a friend when you didn’t know anyone here. Now you’ve made friends at school you don’t want to know her, do you? You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

“I still play with her.”

“Yes, and then you come home telling tales about her stealing. She looks like a thief to you, does she? Do you know, Susan, I think if we aren’t careful you’ll be turning into a snob. Eve can’t help the way she looks. I’d buy her clothes myself except that might make life worse for her. You know what it’s like for her at home.”

Susan wondered suddenly if Eve had stolen the food she’d brought them on their first day here, but it was too late to find out. “Mummy, do you let her hide from her Mummy in here?”

“Yes, there she is, under the settee. Or maybe she’s under the carpet. What are you babbling about, you stupid child?”

Susan knew she would make her more angry, but what else could she do? “She comes in when we aren’t here.”

Mummy stared at her for quite a time before she spoke. “I’m warning you, Susan, if you can’t control your imagination, I’ll give away every one of your books. I’ll give them to Eve to make up for the way you’re treating her. And if you keep on I’ll have your mind looked into. No, I won’t, it was people like that who nearly gave me a breakdown, they won’t get their hands on you.” She was talking to herself and staring at the Oxford postmark on her letter. “Now just shut up and eat your dinner before you put me off eating.”

Susan ducked her head and ate, and watched. Mummy was forking food into her mouth and chewing more and more slowly as she gazed at the envelope. She dug her fork into a chicken leg and let go. The fork keeled over into the gravy as Mummy snatched the letter, so violently that Susan thought she was going to tear it up. “Don’t,” she cried.

“Why don’t you want me to read it? What do you think you know?” Now she was in that strange mood Susan always tried to ignore until it went away. She ripped the envelope and dragged the letter out, read it in a few seconds. “That’s all it is, and the answer’s no, no, no. Won’t you be disappointed, Mister Psychologist, wouldn’t you be, except you don’t know where I am and you never will.” She held up the letter. “Hardly worth stealing, was it?”

It was from someone called Stuart Hay, with a tiny signature above his typed name. Susan only glimpsed words and phrases—“experiment in which you participated,” “aftereffects,” “anything unusual,” “may be important”—before Mummy folded it impatiently. “Why am I letting you read it after what you did? I must want my head examined.”

“I didn’t take it, Mummy.”

“Oh, no, of course, Eve did. Evil Eve who comes in here without a key and wanted you to be her friend. Anything else you can accuse her of?”

Susan ought not to have responded, not when she could see how nervous and strange Mummy was. “She says you dream.”

“What?” Mummy had been stuffing the letter into the envelope, but suddenly she crumpled them in her fist. “What did you say to me?”

Susan had to ask, she mightn’t dare again. “You used to say you never had dreams. You do now though, don’t you?”

“What are you trying to do to me, you little bitch?” As Susan flinched back, Mummy grabbed her hand, crushing her fingers together. “Do you want to help them drive me crazy.’ You wart a crazy mother, do you?”

“You’re hurting me. Mummy, you’re hurting me.”

“I’ll do more than hurt you.” She flung Susan’s hand away from her. Plates rattled, gravy slopped over the table. “Who’s been talking to you? If I thought—” She snatched the letter from the table and waved it in Susan’s face, spattering her with gravy. “Has he been talking to you? Don’t you dare lie to me.”

“No, Mummy.” Susan was trembling. “I don’t know who he is.”

“And you better hadn’t. He’d better stay away.” She looked disgusted. “Wipe your face. Look what you made me do. I don’t know why I bother cooking for you at all.” When she came back through the streamers with a kitchen towel, she said, “You’d better have told me the truth. If he hasn’t been talking to you, who has?”

“I told you. Eve.”

“Oh, of course. Eve’s responsible for everything. If you say one thing more to me about her …” She mopped the table and grabbed the letter, and as she marched into the kitchen Susan heard paper tearing. The streamers scraped like litter in a wind and then exploded outward. Mummy came at her so quickly that Susan almost fell out of her seat. “One more thing, and look at me when you answer. Are you having dreams?”

“No. Mummy.”

Mummy stooped and peered into her eyes. “Are you telling me the truth?”

Susan was afraid to do so. “Yes, Mummy, truly I am.”

“You’d better be, by God you had. There are pills for children who can’t control their imagination, you know. Don’t kid yourself I need to get them from the psychologists, either.” Her face was inches from Susan’s, who felt as if she couldn’t breathe. “Now you listen to me. I don’t dream, I never dream, and I never will. Don’t you dare ask me ever again if I do, don’t even mention the word.”

“I won’t, Mummy. I promise.”

“Just do it once and see what you get.” At last Mummy sat down. “Now eat your dinner.”

“I don’t want any more.”

“Oh, am I supposed to feel guilty? The poor child’s too upset to eat, is she? Well, I don’t want any either, what do you think of that? So all this is for the bin. That’s what your lying and your stupidity cost.” She stalked back from scraping the food into the pedal bin. “You won’t make me feel guilty and you won’t make me dream. And don’t you look at me like that, young lady, or I’ll knock you down. That’s just how your father used to look.”

“But Mummy,” Susan wailed, “I’m not looking like anything.”

“You don’t look like much, right enough. There you are, you’re doing it again, that pitying look—will we have to have Helen put away. Just like him. Get in the kitchen!” she screamed, and Susan fled, sobbing.

Snow floated past the window as she washed the dishes and dabbed her eyes with the backs of her soapy hands. Her face was out there in the drifting night, she couldn’t help it if it looked like Daddy’s. At last she had to go back in the big room. “Just don’t say anything,” Mummy said. “If you ever make me lose control like that again, you’ll wish you had never been born.”

She was watching television—MTV, now that she worked there. They were apologizing for having shown some film or other about the police. Susan went to the window to look at the vanishing tire tracks and the mounds that were parked cars. It must be litter that made the shape of footprints in the snow of the garden under the window; there couldn’t be just two footprints with none leading there or away. Her imagination had got her into enough trouble, and she turned away and went to her encyclopedias. “I don’t know if I should let you read that after the way you’ve been behaving,” Mummy said.

She meant Eve’s book on top of the encyclopedias.

Susan hadn’t wanted to read that, but now, perversely, she did. When she put her hand on it. Mummy said, “Go on,” gruffly. Susan took it to her chair and tried to get engrossed so that she wouldn’t hear the television, but the stories she knew had been changed, which annoyed her— when the prince climbed up Rapunzel’s hair to take her away, he found it was growing out of the witch’s head, the witch had been wearing a mask all the time; and when the woodcutter opened up the wolf to let out Red Riding Hood, the wolf turned into her grandmother—and she began to look at the pictures instead. She didn’t like them very much now she looked closely. If you looked at them for long, they changed: the path to the open door of a cottage was a forked tongue, a lake with a boat on it had lips and rocky teeth, even a fairy-tale castle was a hand with claws, ready to seize the procession that was riding in. A thick, dim forest illustrated a story called “The Maiden Who Wanted to Go Home,” but where was the maiden? Perhaps there was a tiny figure running where the trees were darkest, fleeing out of an avenue so narrow there was hardly a gap between the trees. Susan brought the book close to her face and felt the focus of her eyes changing. The bright quick sounds of a television commercial receded, were gone. She could see the tiny figure now, and the face that the figure was fleeing; she could see nothing else. She was no longer aware of holding the book, which slipped out of her hands.

She felt herself flood back into the room, out of that microscopic focus. She grabbed the book and glanced wildly about, but the only place she could find for it was the bookshelf. Craning up on tiptoe, she pushed it onto the highest shelf, out of reach now, as if that would help. Mummy ignored her as she stumbled to her chair and gazed blindly at the television. Among the sources of her terror was the thought that Mummy would demand to know what was wrong. She had seen the eyes of the face in the book, seen them somehow though they were tinier than pinheads. They were the eyes that had watched her through the window of the train home from London, and at last she recognized them. They were Eve’s eyes, and the tiny figure fleeing down the dark avenue was herself.

18

T
REES
bulged like a child’s chalk drawings against the yellow sky above Hyde Park. Cars waded through the brown slush that the weekend’s uninterrupted snowfall had piled up for Monday morning. Men in fluorescent orange waistcoats scraped the pavement with spades in Park Lane, shoppers fat with overcoats picked their way between the icy hummocks on Oxford Street. Molly’s stomach was growing cold and stiff as her frozen face, and seemed unlikely to relax until she did what she meant to do. As she pushed through the revolving doors of the MTV building, her breath swelled up gray on the glass. She dumped her things in the fifth-floor office and went in search of Terry Mace. “I wanted to apologize for Saturday,” she said.

“No sweat, princess. I figured you’d mistaken me for someone else.”

“I’d been with the police. They tried to scare me into saying Martin faked that film.”

“Bastards.” But his eyes were wary. “What did you tell them?”

“I couldn’t tell them who had faked it.” She was rather enjoying his wariness. “As a matter of fact, I think whoever did may have been right to do so.”

He looked even more cautious. “How come?”

“Because I think it was a reconstruction of the truth. I think I know who the ringleader was the night Lenny Bennett was killed.”

His eyes were unreadable, his interrogative noise sounded as though he were wary of committing himself to words. “I’ll tell you when I’m sure,” she said.

As she emerged from the lift at the ninth floor, a large man with rimless glasses and a stately walk strode out of the other lift, and she didn’t realize he was Oliver Boycott until he reached his office. He was removing his suede trilby as she went in after him. Except for furry strips of hair above his ears, he was bald. “I’m Molly Wolfe,” she said.

“Pray sit down. Miss Wolfe.” He unbuttoned his overcoat delicately and arranged it on a hanger behind the door. “Any developments since we spoke?”

“No, luckily for them.”

“And for you, I should think.” He sat down at his desk and placed a gold pen parallel to the blotter. “Did you prepare the statement I asked for?”

“Here it is. I’ve written down every single thing I remember.”

“Good for you. That’s the style.” He unfolded the typed pages and slipped his glasses into the breast pocket of his blazer, behind a college badge. Naked, his large face looked bland. “Really,” he said before he’d read two pages, and soon, “Tut, tut. Dear me.” After that he read silently, except for murmuring, “I hope you didn’t think me abrupt when you rang me at home. My grandsons were playing near the river, that was why I had to cut you short.”

His Weybridge house was close to the Thames. “I expect you enjoy their visits as much as they do.”

“Yes, when their parents are speaking to each other. My daughter and her husband started out believing each other to be perfect,” he said sadly. “Few things are so dangerous as seeking one’s ideal. Dreams do not come true, in my experience.”

She was glad when he tapped the pages together and looked up. “And you’ve signed it,” he said approvingly. “I take it they did you no physical harm.”

“They were too clever.”

“So it seems. Well, you’ve done everything I would expect of you. Now we must confront the appropriate people with your statement and see what they have to say.”

“I want to confront them myself,” Molly said, and stood up. “Face to face.”

“It may well come to that.”

“I want to now. Will you come with me?”

“I don’t think that’s necessary just yet.” Before she could say that it was to her, he held up one chubby palm. “Have you told Staffing what you told me?”

“Not yet.”

“You must, you know. It relates to your professional behavior.” He touched the phone but strode along the corridor instead. “Mr. Gould seems to be a victim of the blizzards,” he said when he came back. “Still en route.”

Molly had been thinking. “May I use your phone?”

“Certainly.” He opened his mail with a bone paper knife while she dialed. He looked up sharply when she said, “Inspector Maitland, please,” but by then it was too late. She smiled tightly when she heard Maitland’s voice, and replaced the receiver. “He’s there.”

“I really wouldn’t advise confronting him.”

“Don’t you think you ought to see how he reacts?” She wanted Maitland to know she wasn’t defenseless now and never had been. “If you won’t go with me,” she said and wished she hadn’t been so final, “I’ll go myself.”

His bland face stared at her, then he stood up. “Perhaps it will be best if I see for myself.”

At the police station the desk sergeant recognized Molly at once.

“We should like to see Inspector Maitland,” Boycott said.

“Who would?”

“Molly Wolfe from MTV,” she said, “and Oliver Boycott, our lawyer.”

She hadn’t anticipated how enraged returning to Maitland’s office would make her feel. The sight of him, watching her with faint amusement across the photograph of his daughters, started her trembling. “Well, Miss Wolfe,” he said with his quizzical, teacherish look, “what can we do for you today?”