Thorn (17 page)

‘You asked about Edmund.' Thalia's voice was soft.

‘Yes.'

‘Edmund is so brilliant, Dan. So perceptive.' Her voice held a blurred, unreal note, and Dan felt as if someone had brushed down his spine with an icy finger. She said ‘is', not ‘was'.

He chose his next words carefully. ‘He would have made a good successor to Royston Ingram?'

‘Oh yes.' In the shadowy room her thin face was suddenly alight with haggard radiance. ‘Yes, he has knowledge and insight, and even at such a young age—' There was the briefest movement of her head, as if she tilted it to listen, and then she smiled slightly. Her eyes were blank black discs.

And then she set down her glass and deliberately reached out to a small table lamp behind her. Warm light flooded over the table at once, chasing back the crawling shadows. ‘Dan, I'm sorry. I'm talking as if he's still alive. I do it sometimes. I am aware that I do it. But it's been so difficult to accept his death, you see. He was such a golden creature.'

‘If you would like to talk about it – I mean not as part of the interview . . .' Blast, I'm rotten at this kind of thing, thought Dan. And how genuine is she?

But Thalia said, ‘I would far rather talk about something more interesting.'

Dan caught the deepening of her voice. We're off, he thought, and felt a prickle of apprehension, but beneath it the stirring of desire. He met her eyes levelly and said, ‘Such as?'

‘Whether we might take the rest of the wine to bed?'

Dan was aware that he had been deliberately and calculatedly wined and dined and feted – not lavishly and not clumsily, but elegantly, and with some subtlety. It was this subtlety that made the issuing of the blatant invitation very nearly jarring. Dan was unable to decide if it denoted extreme sophistication or plain naivety. But there was nothing naive about Thalia. There might be vanity. Yes, there had been a flavour of I-know-you're-going-to-accept about her invitation. And the trouble is, thought Dan, I am going to accept. I'm a bit worried about her motives and I'm very worried indeed about the suggestion that she thinks Edmund is still alive somewhere. I'm not worried about impotence – my God, I'm not! – but that's probably all I'm not worried about. Well, not at the moment. She repels me on the one hand and fascinates me on the other, but as long as I can keep the repulsion at bay and the fascination in the foreground . . . I wonder how old she is. Forty? Forty-two?

Thalia reached across the table and took his hand. Her fingers were cool and silken. She said, softly, ‘I am probably fifteen years your senior, Dan. Does that matter?'

‘You read thoughts?' It always fascinated and amazed Dan how immensely erotic the stroking of palm with finger could be.

‘An educated guess.' She regarded him. ‘
Does
it matter?'

Dan wondered whether to say, ‘Madam, age will not wither you, nor custom stale your infinite variety,' and decided against it. ‘It doesn't matter the least bit.'

He was not unaccustomed to being on the receiving end of seduction. He was not unaccustomed to exerting the technique on his own account either. He thought he was pretty much prepared for what was ahead, but what he was not prepared for was for his own character, the dark, greedy Margot, suddenly to claw her way into his mind and from there into the lamp-lit sitting room. When Thalia issued that odd, unsubtle invitation, Dan heard a black echo of Margot luring one of her wretched cat's-paw lovers into bed. For several seconds he could very nearly see Margot, exactly as he had depicted her – tall and thin and faintly haggard – standing just behind Thalia, like a ghost twin or a phantom image seen in the jolting window of a railway carriage or a deserted late-night bus.

It was the most bizarre thing he had ever experienced. He thought he might well doubt his sanity in the morning, but if he was really crossing the line and entering some strange half-world where his characters were not only real but crawling out of the woodwork to seduce him, it was very necessary indeed to put from his mind certain of Margot's grislier techniques. It was absolutely vital not to remember the chapter where she had sucked one of her poor wretched young men dry several times over without respite, using fingers and lips to augment her body, leaving him moaning on the bed, clutching his groin which throbbed with agonising cramp. What they used to call an attack of lovers' balls. Dan had dredged this expression up from the magpie corners of his mind, and he had put the episode in to spice up Margot's character and add the obligatory vein of steamy sex.

By the time they reached the bedroom his tangled emotions were warring with one another and he no longer knew which of the two women he was undressing. Thalia lit candles and set the silver holders on a low dressing table, so that the soft blurred discs of light reflected over and over in the mirror. As Dan parted Thalia's thighs and slid between them, there was a moment when the candle flames flickered and danced, throwing distorted images in the mirror's depths. On the rim of his vision he caught the fleeting glimpse of a figure in the mirror's smoky depths – or maybe emerging out of it. Someone with thin, sexless hips and haggard eyes and a curving, hungry mouth, holding out hands that were dark and dripping . . . There was a faint stirring on the other side of the bed, as if someone had turned back the sheets for a moment and then slipped in beside them.

Margot, straight from that gore-drenched killing of Rosamund's parents.

The sensation sent Dan's body soaring into fierce, helpless passion and when Thalia slid her hands between his thighs and began to caress him to point-of-no-return arousal, he felt Margot's thin, bony fingers twining with Thalia's, digging her sharp little fingernails into his skin. There was a moment when there were unmistakably two sets of hands exploring his body, and the thought, God Almighty, I'm about to screw them both! skidded across his mind. This is probably most men's major erotic fantasy, he thought incredulously. One in front of me, one behind . . . And then he felt the butterfly touch again, and he thought: if whichever of them is doing
that
keeps on doing it, this is going to be the shortest encounter in history . . . No, it's all right. Here we go, then . . .

He dressed swiftly in the cold, early-morning light, considering whether to wake Thalia before leaving or whether to just leave quietly, putting a note on the table, and phoning her later in the day.

He did not want to see Thalia over breakfast. He admitted it at last, and considered the admission carefully. It had nothing to do with embarrassment and nothing to do with motives of delicacy. It was simply that having dined with a faintly sinister lady by soft, golden lamplight, and having explored her body by candlelight, he did not want the dark romance to melt before a forty-something woman in a dressing gown, frying bacon for breakfast. Half-baked romanticism, Daniel? Or something deeper?

He knew perfectly well that it was something deeper. He was already uneasily aware that Thalia and Margot were becoming inextricably tangled in his mind; he did not like either of them very much, and he certainly did not like the emotions that had been dredged up from his deepest mind earlier on. The trouble was that he might still need Thalia to find out about Imogen and he would certainly still need Margot. But he needed Margot as a cold, merciless bitch who could wind a seductive bewitchment into a man's heart and into his loins, and he did not want that witchery spoiled by seeing her in a dressing gown, or with bad breath in the morning, or looking middle-aged without make-up. He wanted Thalia and Margot both to be mysterious, ageless temptresses; creatures of nightshade deadliness, sable-haired and sloe-eyed . . . ‘
Come into my parlour, said the villainess to the romantic lead . . .
' – No, that had been Margot, Thalia had made that suggestion about the wine. ‘
Come into my bedroom, my dear, and see how hungry I can be . . . Bring the wine while you're about it and we'll slake all our thirsts . . . My, what strong thighs you have, my dear
. . .' All the better to ride you, madam . . . ‘
And my, what splendidly stiff manhood you have . . .
' All the better to screw you, madam . . .

I think, said Dan to himself, very firmly indeed, I really do think that I'd better get out of this particular spider's clutches before I lose my grip on reality entirely. And Margot, you bitch, if you're going to behave in this unruly manner, you might have to be killed off earlier than you expect.

He went out into the odd half-world of the extreme early morning and, after walking for a while, picked up a cruising taxi near Langham Place, which took him home.

His own flat was untidy; the carpet needed vacuuming and the bedroom was strewn with cast-off sweaters and yesterday's shirt and three pairs of socks.

Dan had never been so glad to see any of it. He had never been so grateful for the blessed familiarity and he was even pleased to see the trail of cornflakes on the kitchen worktop where Oliver had taken the packet upside down out of the cupboard. Oliver was still in bed, and Dan moved quietly about his own bedroom. His brother might later ask if he had had a good evening, but he was more likely to avoid the subject altogether, partly from tact and partly from embarassment.

At half past six Dan gave up the fight to sleep, got up, brewed a pot of coffee, made a sketchy attempt to tidy the worst of the chaos and sat down at his desk with a sense of relief. He had sometimes heard writers – or maybe they were only would-be writers – wax complaining about their work and their characters, cursing their heroes and denouncing their heroines as irritating. This was completely incomprehensible; Dan loved every one of his characters with consuming passion. He embarked on a new chapter with a feeling of safety and homecoming. While he was here, the world and its problems could go hang for a while.

Rosamund was by this time nicely incarcerated in the old Victorian madhouse. Dan had unashamedly used Oliver's notes, which had been so vivid and so graphic that they would probably give him nightmares. Oliver had turned up several primary-source references to Victorian workhouses, and also to the original Bedlam sited first at Bishopsgate and later at Lambeth. These conjured up an appalling image of people discarded by society and forgotten: orphaned children and elderly, impoverished men and women flung into workhouses to sew sackcloth aprons or mailbags; long windowless dormitories and wards where the stench of human excrement and human sweat was like a thick wall, and where the reek of sadness and loneliness and neglect was just as strong. There were horrific descriptions of what was called a commode bench: a wooden structure like a multi-seated earth closet, to which the incontinent and the paraplegic and the severely retarded were strapped for months on end. Dan read the descriptions feeling a bit sick, and was grateful to hear Oliver making coffee and toast in the kitchen. There was the smell of burning, and then determined sounds of a second onslaught on the toaster. Presently Oliver appeared with a cup of coffee which he set down at Dan's elbow along with a plate of buttered toast, and went off to shower. Dan ate and drank with enjoyment and felt as if he was back in his own skin again.

It was time now for Rosamund to go into the long sleep that was the kingpin of the book and the heartwood of the ancient legend. This dramatic plummet into unconsciousness had been steadily drawing closer ever since she had discovered the mutilated remains of her parents and spun into hysteria, and Dan had considered several methods for creating the actual sleep. It would have been nice to have somehow introduced a spinning wheel, or at the very least some kind of spindle mechanism, but he had abandoned the idea in favour of a straightforward drugged slumber – perhaps even a full-blown coma – which was something that modern readers would more easily identify with.

With this in mind, he had earlier in the week borrowed an armful of medical books from the nearest library. He tumbled them on to his desk and inspected his booty. Some of the books were long-winded and some were technical and most were multi-syllabic. One proved to be a kind of Lambs' Tales From Psychiatry, which explained hypnotism in terms of bright swinging pocket watches and started off by saying, ‘Sigmund Freud believed that dreams tell us a lot about our lives.' Two turned out to be written wholly in German and would therefore have to be returned unopened, which was a nuisance because they were heavy to carry.

Dan stacked them crossly in the hall to await his next forage in the library, and returned to his desk to pick his way through the maze presented by the rest. He started with the hallucinogenic drugs, and read solemnly about mescaline and marijuana and lysergic acid diethylamide, only realising after ten minutes that this last was, of course, the LSD of the flower children of the sixties and seventies. He cast the book irritably aside. Beleaguered on all sides she might be, but Dan was blowed if he was going to let his heroine be felled by a plot device that was twenty-five years out of date. He turned hopefully to the chapters on barbiturates and psycho-active drugs, and considered whether Rosamund might be sent into her death-like coma by a deliberate overdose of chloral hydrate or methaqualone, both of which were apparently sedative-hypnotic and either of which could be administered by the manipulative doctor with satisfyingly spectacular consequences. Or maybe it would be better for her to be subjected to psycho-active substances, which could modify the biochemical or physiological processes of the brain.

He reread this last section three times, got up to pour another cup of coffee from the pot Oliver had made, and read it again. No better. Even with the help of a large dose of caffeine he could only make minimal sense out of brain neurons and the artificial ways of bridging the gaps between them, which could, it appeared, have any number of startling results. Even if he had fathomed it, he doubted his ability to inject much entertainment into it. It would admittedly provide terrific medical verisimilitude, but Dan did not think many readers would really want to read about electrical and chemical transmission between nerve cells, unless of course they happened to be biophysicists or neurosurgeons in which case they were not very likely to be reading this kind of book in the first place. He abandoned the psycho-active substances and hoped he was not dishonestly ducking out of essential research.