Incarnate (5 page)

4

T
HE ESTATE AGENT’S
black moustache looked as if it had been drawn with a marker pen. Susan didn’t feel rude for staring fascinated at it, not when he had ignored her ever since she had sat down, even when she’d asked him where he lived—to give herself the chance to talk about home. Now he undipped his pen and tapped the desk as if to wake Mummy up. “Is that the kind of thing you had in mind, Mrs. Verney?”

Mummy gave him back the handful of typed pages she had been sorting. “Haven’t you anything nearer?”

“Nearer to what, madam?”

“Here.”

“I gathered that, madam. I meant to say, what do you particularly want to be close to?”

Mummy frowned at him and gestured round herself.

“Here.”

“Forgive me if I’m being obtuse. You want to be close. to this office, do you mean?”

“Yes, if you like.” Mummy’s dark eyes stared at him from her pale face. She was frowning harder, which made her face seem even older. She always looked over forty when she was worried, though she’d turned thirty last month. She pulled her plaid skirt over her knees, the way she did when she was talking to a man she didn’t like. “Have you anything?”

Susan might have felt sorry for him—he didn’t know that Mummy was often like this—except that she was too nervous. She noticed that he gave a tiny shrug as he sorted through another bunch of pages. “This is over there,” he said, pointing past the couples who were looking in the window at the photographs of houses. “But I must say that it isn’t as attractive as the others you’ve been considering.”

Mummy read the page and handed it to Susan. “It sounds quite homey, doesn’t it?”

Living room with gas fire and fitted carpet, bedroom, kitchen, bathroom/WC. It didn’t sound at all like home to Susan, and how could it to Mummy? London felt like getting lost, it was so big, and the flat sounded like having no home. “I don’t know,” she said miserably.

“You could have the bedroom. I don’t mind sleeping on the couch.” Mummy stood up, looking eager. “We’d like to see it. Can we go now?”

“By all means.” He called his partner out of the inner office once he had found the keys. “I’m just taking this lady over the way.”

Lorries halted gasping at the lights, and he ushered Mummy across. A West Indian wearing an ankle-length coat and headphones pushed past Susan as she hurried after Mummy, the November wind biting her ears. A cut-out lady stood in the window of a W. H. Smith’s and invited them to book their summer holidays, but how could they if Mummy spent all she had on the lease? The estate agent was leading them away from the main road, and Susan felt the store dwindling behind her. It was the last thing that seemed at all familiar or comforting. When she caught up with Mummy and held on to her hand, Mummy didn’t even give hers a squeeze.

Perhaps Mummy was secretly daunted by the houses too. They were so big, many of them five stories high; even the trees in their front gardens couldn’t reach higher. Crescents curved away from the side road, more and more white terraces that looked as if they might never end. The porches were tall as double-decker buses, giants’ porches. If she lived here she might as well be lost in a land of giants. The white façades beneath the cold swift sky made her think of tombs.

Perhaps there was still hope, for Mummy seemed uneasy. “I didn’t think it would be this far,” she murmured.

The estate agent took her elbow to lead her into a crescent opposite a weeping willow. “Here we are,” he said, but the side road was out of sight before he turned along a garden path through a gateway without a gate.

The house looked just like all the others with four stories to Susan, and she could imagine not being able to find it, wandering the maze of streets until it was too dark to see. Someone had been painting something on the patchy lawn, for there was an oblong yellow outline on the grass. Apart from that and the cars parked nose to tail alongside both pavements, there was no sign of life in the street. “I suppose that isn’t too far,” was all Mummy said.

When the estate agent unlocked the door, a smell of dust and cats came out of the house. Circles of black water marked the linoleum in the gloomy hall, the stair carpet turned into another carpet halfway up the first flight, under bare lightbulbs that hung on crooked cords. Mummy strode in. “It’s the second floor, isn’t it?” she said.

All the stairs creaked. The first floor smelled of old boiled cabbage, the second floor stank of cats and what they did. Two doors faced each other across the narrow landing, in the muddy glow from the skylight above the top floor. Once he’d unlocked the left-hand door, the estate agent stood aside, and Susan wondered if he was ashamed to go in.

The large bare room had been made smaller by a partition wall in which a doorway was hung with plastic streamers. A cracked Donald Duck mug sat on the mantelpiece above the gas fire. Pieces of brown carpet had been stuck together to cover the floor; in places they were curling up. Apart from the partition, the walls were papered with a floral pattern. All the flowers were too big for the room.

Mummy pushed through the plastic streamers. “Oh, look, Susan, there’s a little hall.”

It was more like a box, with just enough room for two people abreast, and it was very dark. Another set of streamers hid the kitchen, a narrow room with a grimy cooker and a stained sink unit. Two shaky doors led off the hall, to a bathroom where the toilet was squeezed between the wall and the bath and to a windowless space that must be the bedroom, since the pale shape of a vanished double bed took up half the bare floor. “It’s snug, isn’t it?” Mummy said, dragging at a frayed string until the bedroom light came on. “We don’t really need all that space at home for just the two of us. What do you think? Do you like it?”

How could she even ask? “No!” Susan cried.

Mummy looked bewildered, then determined. “Well, I’m sure you will once we settle in.”

Susan glimpsed how surprised the estate agent was in the moment before he controlled his face. She felt as she had the first time she’d realized that something was wrong with Mummy, that all she could do was love her and pretend she hadn’t noticed and hope that Mummy would get better. She’d thought that Mummy had, but now Mummy was saying, “Can we go back so I can sign the lease?”

Wind twanged the aerials of parked cars and made the bare trees squeal. A wet newspaper with a staring face sailed across two gardens, caught on a gatepost, and struggled there until the face tore in half. As Mummy and the estate agent strode heads down into the wind, Susan lagged behind. She was trying to slow them down while she tried desperately to think of a way to stop Mummy from signing the lease.

Perhaps he wouldn’t be able to find it when they got back to the office. Perhaps Mummy wouldn’t have enough cash with her—there must be something to pay. If only there were someone with them to tell Mummy to think it over, sleep on it—and then she had it. “Will Daddy have to sign too?”

Mummy glared at her as the estate agent hesitated. “Forgive me,” he said, “I understood you were divorced.”

“So I am.” She sounded proud of it, and furious with Susan. “I can show you the papers next time I come down if you like.”

At least that would cause a delay, give Susan time to think of something else. She drew a shaky breath that felt like ice in her nostrils. Then the estate agent said, “That won’t be necessary. You do own your home.” He looked back at Susan. “Don’t worry, young lady, everything’s in hand.”

He meant that she was only ten years old, she couldn’t be expected to understand these things. All she had achieved was to make sure they would take no more notice of her. She sat in the office among posters of smiling couples with keys to their new homes and watched helplessly as the estate agent asked Mummy questions and filled in a form, passed it to her, waited while she read it, and handed her a pen. Mummy’s signature was loud and scratchy. Susan felt as if she were already back in the cold empty flat, as if she hadn’t left it and never would.

Mummy hired a taxi to Euston, to celebrate. Their carriage on the train was empty, which Mummy always liked. “Lots of room,” she said, which made Susan think of the windowless space that would be her bedroom, not even half the size of hers at home. Soon the train was gathering speed toward Liverpool: the lit streets flew away, the nighttime fields flooded by like ink, until they turned gray with snow. “You’ll like it when we move,” Mummy said, “I promise.”

“I don’t want to.” She was near to tears. “Why have we got to move?”

“Because I want a change. I don’t want to be stuck in Wallasey for the rest of my life, and neither should you. London is where the opportunities are. Perhaps we won’t have to stay there forever. But you’ll like it, it’ll be an adventure. You wait and see.”

A town glinted beyond the glowing fields and was doused by a sudden fall of snow that must have been a hill. The train was rocking Mummy to sleep. Now her eyes were closed and moving behind her eyelids, as if they were watching something Susan couldn’t see. That was supposed to happen when you were dreaming—but Mummy said she never dreamed. The sight of her eyes shifting in sleep, out of control, made Susan even more anxious for her. She couldn’t be dreaming, for dreaming was wrong. Susan didn’t know why, but it was.

She remembered the time half her life ago, when Mummy had kept demanding over breakfast if she had been dreaming. “I don’t want you dreaming, that’s all,” she’d said as if that was reassuring, but for years Susan had been scared to go to sleep in case a dream carried her away. She’d felt them waiting for her in the dark where her night-light couldn’t reach. The sight of Mummy lolling as the empty carriage swayed made her feel nervous and alone. She jumped up and went to the buffet car.

The can of Coke took most of the money in her purse. She sipped it and stared at Mummy and thought that at least Mummy was sleeping all night these days, she’d said so. Just a few nights ago she’d frightened Susan awake by shouting incomprehensibly in her sleep, and Susan hadn’t dared go in and wake her. Why, that had been the night before she’d said they were going to London, and Susan wished now that she’d wakened her, though she didn’t know what use that would have been.

Susan looked out at the gray glow that was sailing by at a hundred miles an hour. It made her feel sleepy too. She gulped her Coke so that the fizzing in her nose would keep her awake, and then she was coughing and spluttering as loo much went up her nose. She would have covered her mouth while she coughed, except that suddenly she hoped her coughing would wake Mummy up. Mummy didn’t even stir. Susan coughed and wept and fumbled her handkerchief out of her sleeve. She drew a deep breath and gave in to a last fit of coughing while she kept her eyes shut and wished fiercely that when she opened them she would see Mummy awake. At last she looked, but Mummy hadn’t moved. She looked out the window again but had to dab her eyes before she could make out the speeding fields. And the face looking in at her.

She cried out, more loudly when Mummy didn’t wake. Her eyes were blurred and stinging, and rubbing them only made them worse. The face had been between Mummy’s reflection and her own, but when she turned to look the carriage was deserted. The doors at either end were miles away. She made herself turn again to the window. The lace was still there, if you could call it a face. Nothing was clear in the bright pink oval except the eyes.

“Mummy!” she cried, tugging at her hands. If Mummy woke, the face would go away, please let that be true! “Mummy, Mummy,” she pleaded, tugging so desperately that she was afraid Mummy would topple off her seat. The edge of her vision was a rushing blur, but something pink was closer, hovering. Susan twisted Mummy’s hands and saw her eyelids flutter, but then Mummy sank into sleep again. Now Susan thought of something that would wake her up, though she couldn’t have said why it should. Mummy,” she cried, “why really have we got to move?” Mummy’s eyes wavered open. If the look in them meant that she knew the answer, Susan no longer wanted to know. The next moment they closed again, and Susan dug her nails into the limp hands. “Mummy!” she screamed. Mummy jerked awake and snatched her hands away. Good God, child, what’s wrong?”

“There was—” But there was nothing. The carriage was deserted except for her and Mummy, and so was the reflection. There was nothing except a gray glow. “Try and have a little doze if you’re bored,” Mummy said, closing her eyes again. “For heaven’s sake let me get some sleep.”

5

T
HE NORTHERN TOWN
was deep in snow. Molly dined in the hotel’s cavernous dining room among deserted tables and echoes of the limping waiter, then went up to her room. Large slow melting flakes brushed the window. The television said it was Britain’s worst November for more than ten years and predicted that December would be worse. She hoped Ben was getting soaked out there. Perhaps now he was regretting leaving her behind.

“The fewer of us who are at the interview the better,’^ he’d said, but she was sure he had been getting his own back for yesterday’s argument about the rooms. She wished she could tell him that she was going to work with Martin, but she needed to understand her own feelings.

Ben ought to have had this room after all, for a bulge in the carpet under the bed yielded up two pornographic magazines, dated next year. She put them back and tried to read the paperback of
War and Peace
she’d bought that afternoon. The opening pages seemed familiar, yet she was certain she had never attempted the novel before. It felt like a kind of double vision and was so distracting that soon she gave up. She was sleepy, that was all.

She was in her pajamas when someone knocked lightly at the door. “Yes?” she called.

“It’s me, Molly.”

It infuriated her that he assumed she would know who it was. “What do you want?” she said, not moving.

“Open the door, will you?” His voice was as muted as his knock had been. “We can’t talk like this.”

The sooner she got rid of him, the sooner she could sleep. She bundled herself into her Finnish coat and opened the door a crack. “What is it, Ben?”