(1990) Sweet Heart (28 page)

‘My acupuncturist wanted me to stop those.’

‘You’ve been having acupuncture?’

‘Yes.’ She blushed.

Ross smiled. ‘Why not, Charley? Try everything. I’ve heard some very good reports about acupuncture.’ He glanced through her notes. ‘How many periods have you had over the last six months?’

‘I’m not sure. Two — maybe three.’

‘Are you and Tom still trying to start a family?’

Tom. Tom
. The mention of the name was like a sting. ‘Yes.’

‘Are you going to try an
in vitro
implant again?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t think I could bear the thought of another ectopic.’

‘You were unlucky, Charley. The chances of a second ectopic pregnancy are small.’

‘But I only have one tube left.’

‘You’ve got some time still; you don’t have to rush into any decisions.’ He put his pen down and pushed his sleeves up his hairy wrists.

‘You’ve been through a lot over the past few years, haven’t you?’ he said.

She felt weepy, suddenly, struggling to hold back her tears. She stared out of the window at the small garden, a lawn with a rose bed border beneath a high brick wall and the fire escape of the building beyond. It was quiet and she could barely hear the traffic.

Ross was looking at her neck again.

Tell him. Tell him.

Tom, it’s Tony Ross here. Thought you ought to know that Charley’s gone nuts; tried to hang herself
.

‘Moving home is a very traumatic thing, Charley. It’s likely that these symptoms you are having could just be down to stress, but I’d like to have a few tests done. I’ll take some blood and urine, and I think it would be sensible for you to see a neurologist and have a electro encephlogram — and EEG scan.’

‘Tony,’ she said, ‘could I ask you something?’

‘Sure, of course.’

She reddened. ‘Have you ever had any patients who — who think they have been reincarnated?’

‘Yes, I’ve had several over the years,’ he said, replacing his pen in his pocket. ‘I have a woman at the moment — bit of a fruitcake — who has back pains for no apparent reason. She’s convinced it’s because she was in a stagecoach accident in a previous life.’

‘Do you believe her?’

‘I’m a doctor of medicine, Charley, not a parapsychologist. I think it’s a load of phooey. Why do you ask?’

‘I — I’m just curious. Do you think there’s something that could explain — medically — all these things I’m getting?’

‘Yes, indeed, and a lot more convincingly than a past life.’ He smiled confidently. ‘It’s not a brain tumour, you don’t need to worry about that, but there’s one possibility I’d like to eliminate. You wouldn’t know if you have any history of epilepsy in your family, would you?’

‘Epilepsy? No.’

‘Of course not, you poor thing. These bloody adoption laws are so stupid. There are so many hereditary things which it might be helpful to know about.’

‘Epilepsy,’ she repeated.

‘Trust me, Charley. You don’t have anything serious to worry about.’

‘Isn’t epilepsy serious?’

‘Not these days. I don’t want to worry you, Charley. All your symptoms are consistent with stress and that’s by far the most likely cause, but I have to eliminate other possibilities. You’ve always suffered from stress and moving house is bound to have made that worse. I think that’s almost certainly all that’s wrong with you, but some of your symptoms are also consistent with a very mild form of epilepsy — temporal lobe epilepsy. Temperature changes in the body, sensory delusions, olfactorial illusions — the perfume, the burning —
déjà vu
, your feelings of fear, depression, sleepwalking. Temporal lobe epileptics often carry out functions unconsiously, either sleepwalking or doing things when they are awake without realising it.’

Charley stared at him, her mind churning. ‘Doing things without realising it?’

‘We do things without realising it all the time. Haven’t you ever driven down a motorway and suddenly found you’ve gone ten or fifteen miles without being in the slightest bit aware of it?’

She wiped some stray strands of hair off her forehead. ‘Could you do something harmful to yourself without realising it?’

The corners of his eyes crinkled and he shook his head. ‘The human body has a strong sense of self-preservation. If they’re heading into danger, sleepwalkers usually wake up.’

‘But not always?’

‘There have been the odd instances of people falling down staircases or off balconies. There’s no guarantee people won’t hurt themselves. But it doesn’t happen very often.’

‘Have you ever heard of’ — she hesitated — ‘of anyone trying to kill themselves in their sleep?’

Their eyes met, his kind grey-blue eyes crystal clear,
as if he took them out and polished them.

‘No,’ he said.

‘Do you think it’s possible somebody could do that?’

‘No, I don’t.’ He looked at her neck, more obviously this time. ‘Why are you asking me this?’

‘No reason. I was just curious.’

He stood up. ‘Let’s go to the examination room and do those tests.’ He came round the desk and rested his arm on her shoulder. ‘Is there anything wrong, Charley? You’ve got some nasty marks on your neck.’

‘Oh —’ she shrugged. ‘I got it caught — a trunk — I was unpacking some stuff and the lid came down —’

He squeezed her shoulder gently. ‘You’d tell me if there was something wrong, wouldn’t you?’

She nodded but was unable to look him in the face, was unable to speak for a moment in case the tears exploded. She could feel his eyes on her neck again; she could feel them as if he were probing the marks with his fingers.

Charley followed Ernest Gibbon upstairs, his feet plodding, the stairs creaking and smelling of boiled cabbage and scented air freshener. She looked at the familiar Artexed walls and the wooden plates with scenes of Switzerland whilst he paused to get his breath back on the first floor landing.

His skin hung slackly from his face, and his eyes, behind the thick lenses of his glasses, had sunk a little further into their sockets. He breathed in short wheezy gasps like a punctured squeeze box, walked across to his mother’s room, rapped on the door and went in. ‘Got a client, mother. I’ve put the lunch on, and locked the front door.’

They went on up, and Charley lay down on the couch in the attic room under the microphone. ‘Thank you for seeing me so quickly.’ she said.

He lowered himself into his chair, leaned over and checked his recording equipment, then made Charley do a brief voice test which he played back. ‘How have you been?’ he said.

‘Not good.’

‘Do you feel up to going through with it — all the way?’

‘I need to.’

‘Yes. You do.’ He looked at her as if he knew exactly what had happened. ‘You’re going to have to be strong.
When you start screaming, that’s when I’ve always brought you out before. I shan’t bring you out this time. Are you happy with that?’

She tore at the skin above one of her nails, and felt a lump in her throat.

Gibbon switched out the overhead light.

She stopped, hot, tired and thirsty from her long journey, leaned against the brick parapet of the roaring weir, and gazed down at the house in the hollow, a hundred yards away below her. The house of the woman who had ruined her life.

She wiped the perspiration off her brow with the back of her hand and was grateful for the cooling spray that rose up from the weir as she scoured the property with her tear-blurred eyes for signs of life. She looked at the disused watermill, at the stable block, and warily at the barn with its silent empty kennel outside, and the brass ring beside it.

The black sports car was parked in the drive. Good. He was here. Somewhere. She slipped her hand inside her bag and felt the cold steel blade of the knife.

Talk. Just want to talk. That’s all.

She stared again at the house, looking for movement in the mullioned windows, for faces, for the twitch of a curtain.

‘Do you recognise where you are?’ she heard a voice say, a flat distant voice.

The sun was setting directly behind the house, the rays of light stinging her eyes, making it hard to see, throwing long black shadows up the bank towards her.

‘Are you in the same place as before?’ The voice was faint, a distant echo. She vaguely wondered where it came from as she walked slowly through the gateposts on to the scrunching gravel of the driveway. The unborn child inside her kicked sharply, as if it could sense her
fear, as if it were trying to warn her not to go on; she pressed her hand against her swollen belly, and patted it. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘Talk. Just want to talk. That’s all.’

She stopped at the bottom of the steps to the front door, and dabbed the perspiration on her forehead with the back of her hand. The house seemed much larger from here, forbidding. She looked up at each of the small dark windows in turn, and listened, trying to hear a sound in the motionless air of the warm summer evening that was not her own panting or the roaring of water.

She looked across the mill race at the stables, down at the barn, at the mill; and then at the car again. A thrush took off with a worm trailing from its beak. She heard the distant bang of a shotgun, then another, the bleat of a sheep, the barking of a dog.

She climbed the steps up to the front door and paused, nervously eyeing the shiny lion’s head knocker which glared menacingly back at her. The door was slightly ajar and she pushed it further open and peered into the hallway.

There was no sign of anyone. She hesitated, then walked in, stopped and listened again. Her shadowy reflection stared back through the gloom from a spangled mirror on the wall. There was a staircase ahead with a passageway beside it, and doors to the left and right of her. The house smelled of furniture polish and a rich musky perfume; it felt feminine, elegant, alien.

There was a creak upstairs and she froze.

She stood for a full minute in silence, listening, but heard nothing more other than the tick of a clock and her own heavy breathing. She lifted the iron latch handle on the door on her left and pushed it open.

The room was empty. The diffused rays of the setting
sunlight through the French windows bathed the soft eau de nil and peach colourings. It felt so sumptuous, so beautiful; it almost made her turn and run out in hopelessness. The furniture was grand, graceful Art Deco, the pictures on the walls were mostly of elegant women in fine clothes, the lamps seemed to be ornamental. It was another world.

On the mantelpiece above the empty fireplace an alabaster court jester’s face in a bronze bust smiled menacingly at her, as if he were encouraging her to turn towards the sofa, to look at the dents in the plump cushions. It seemed to be smirking at her knowingly.

There she saw a notepad on a writing bureau, with writing on it, a large feminine scrawl, in black ink.

Hector and Daphne, cocktails, Aug 20th?

Cow. Going to parties whilst she … The handwriting was familiar. She had seen it before.

‘Is it a woman’s handwriting?’ said the distant voice. ‘Can you read me what it says?’

The voice faded. She went across the hall, down a dark passageway, to a kitchen with smart brown linoleum on the floor, bright yellow paintwork and an Aga set into a tiled surround. There were dirty plates on the table, and dirty dishes piled around the sink.

Slut, she thought, walking back down the passageway. Two places were laid on the large refectory table in the dining room for a meal that had been eaten and not cleared away. A half drunk bottle of claret, unstoppered, lay on the sideboard, two glasses, both with a small drop of wine left, were still on the table. The room smelled of cigar smoke. His cigars.

She climbed the steep staircase and stopped at the top, panting from the effort and fear, and listened. The house was silent. She looked up and down the dark landing, then turned to the right and went into the room at the far end.

There were two dressmaker’s dummies on pedestals, one bare, with the word
Stockman
stencilled to its midriff, the other with a partially sewn dress in shiny turquoise taffeta pinned to it. There were four bald shop window mannequins in there also, two of them naked, two of them dressed in stunning evening gowns, one in a strapless black sequinned gown and wearing black gloves, the other in shimmering black moiré silk. She was awed by their elegance, awed because she’d never seen anything like them outside of a shop window in one of the smart London streets.

Her heart sank. London. The name itself brought a feeling of gloom. London. Where she lived, in the grimy building. London. A prisoner.

She walked down the corridor, past a second flight of stairs and hesitated outside a closed door. She opened it slowly, and saw a bedroom with a huge unmade bed, the sheets tousled. There were strong smells of musky perfume, stale cigarette smoke and scented soap. A shiny black telephone sat on a bedside table, an ashtray full of lipsticky butts beside it.

Slut.

She opened the doors of a huge maple wardrobe. Luxurious dresses were hanging there, coats and furs. Finery. The magnificence. Something she could never have known how to buy.

She went to the dressing table and stared in the mirror, ashamed of her own dowdiness, her dumpiness, her pudgy skin, her tangled hair, her cheap muslin maternity smock.

A thick crystal bottle of perfume was on the dressing table. She touched it, ran her fingers over the contours of the glass, picked it up, feeling its weight, pulled out the glass topper, tipped some on to each wrist and rubbed it in. It stung her finger and she noticed a slight
graze. Must have cut it on the knife, she thought, but did not care; the pain felt good. She dabbed some on her neck as well, behind her ears, and rubbed more on her chest. The smell engulfed her. She shook more out, then more still, wiped her face with it, shook it over her clothes, her hair, shook it out until it was empty.

She took the bottle through into the en suite bathroom, stood and listened. Still silence. She removed the toothbrushes from a glass on the washbasin, lowered her knickers and urinated into the glass. Then, carefully, over the washbasin, she filled the perfume bottle with the contents of the glass, restoppered it, wiped it with a face flannel and put it back on the dressing table.