A Dark Dividing (5 page)

‘You don’t mean drugs, do you?’

‘No, not drugs, I’m fairly sure she doesn’t take anything. But she picks up atmospheres and things.’

‘Atmospheres?’

‘Yes. I think she’s a bit telepathic as well—that can be frightfully disconcerting sometimes.’

‘I should think it might.’

‘I’ve always supposed it comes of being a twin,’ said Angelica, and Harry looked at her. After a moment, he said, in a voice carefully devoid of all expression, ‘She’s a twin, is she?’

‘Yes, although she never mentions it. I don’t know what happened to the twin—I think she—or it might even have been a he—must have died.’

People died and people disappeared, Markovitch had said.

‘I’ve sometimes thought Simone feels a bit incomplete because of it,’ said Angelica, and Harry, who had been re-filling the wine glasses, glanced up, because this was an unexpectedly shrewd remark.

He said, carefully, ‘Twins do have an amazingly strong link, of course.’

‘Yes, and—Oh, this is very good wine, Harry. And Simone was right about the house, of course. It’s absolutely perfect. In fact she wondered—’

‘Yes?’

‘I do hate to mix business with pleasure,’ said Angelica semi-apologetically, and Harry smiled at her and thought, Oh, no you don’t, my dear. You’d mix anything you felt like mixing.

‘Simone wondered if you might be able to dig up something about its history,’ said Angelica. ‘It’s smack in the middle of where the aesthetes used to gather, isn’t it? In the eighteen-nineties and the early nineteen-hundreds. Earnest young men with soft shirts and brooding eyes and metaphysical conversation. I don’t mean we want to nail up labels saying Isadora Duncan danced on this table or a plaque saying Oscar Wilde slept here, but Simone thought if anything interesting had happened in the place or if anyone famous had lived there she could set up a display. Old photos and newspaper cuttings and so on. She’s very good at that kind of thing, you know. The past shadowing the present.’

‘I know she is.’ Finding out about the house’s past would mean another link to Angelica and—more to the point—to Simone herself. Harry said, ‘I’ll see what I can find.’

‘Would you? We’d be so grateful.’ Angelica managed to make it sound as if her gratitude might come in a very alluring form indeed. Harry mentally calculated how much his credit card was good for and ordered a second bottle of wine anyway.

‘Did you actually buy the house?’ Because if Angelica had been able to outright buy a house in that part of London she must be even wealthier than the tabloids said.

‘No, we took over a lease. The freeholder’s one of those property management companies—all very efficient, but hydra-headed, and so faceless. Can you be hydra-headed and faceless both together?’ She studied the dessert trolley which was just being trundled past.

‘Do have whatever you’d like,’ said Harry.

‘As a matter of fact,’ she said, resting her chin on her cupped hand and gazing at him with sudden intensity, ‘what I’d really like is to adjourn to my flat for coffee.’ Harry stared at her. ‘What do you think?’ said Angelica and her voice slid down an octave into a sexy purr. Harry felt as if she had stroked the inside of his thigh with a velvet-covered hand. Angelica smiled. ‘Or would you rather stay here for pudding?’

‘I think,’ said Harry, finally disentangling himself from the smile, ‘that I’d rather go to your flat.’

‘For pudding?’

‘Perhaps for a just desert.’

Angelica set a pot of coffee to filter as soon as they got into the flat, and put out a bottle of brandy and two glasses. The kitchen was so small that avoiding physical contact was impossible so Harry did not bother to avoid it.

She was clearly delighted at the approach. She was taller than most girls (those legs), and she moved forward at once so that they were pressed hard together. Her mouth opened under his, and for several minutes they stood locked thigh to thigh in an increasingly passionate embrace, and then Harry began to slide his hands questioningly beneath the luxurious dark red velvet. Angelica gasped with delight, and reached down to pull at her skirt. There was the snapping open of buttons, and a rustle of sound as the skirt slid to the floor. She stepped out of it and kicked it out of the way—Harry retained just enough mental equilibrium to think it took terrific style to treat designer clothes like that. And practice, said a sneaky voice.

It was stockings after all, rather than tights. They were held up by garters and she was wearing silk underwear.

As she pulled him back into the living-room, towards the deep sofa at one end, he was aware that the coffee had filtered and switched itself off. But presumably they could always drink instant coffee afterwards.

It was almost three a.m. before he went out into the odd half-world of the extreme early morning. He picked up a cruising taxi near Holland Park which took him home. In the morning—the real morning, when the world was up and about its lawful occasions—he would send flowers to Angelica. ‘Thank you for a memorable evening,’ he would say on the card. She would smile the wry cat-smile at that.

After he had done that he would tell Markovitch that he was following a number of promising leads and that they had better regard his working hours as flexible for a week or two, and then he would see what he could find about the Bloomsbury house and its previous owners. Angelica had said that Simone had been ‘intense’ about leasing it for Thorne’s. ‘She picks up atmospheres,’ Angelica had said. What had Simone picked up about the house that had made her so passionate about it? As he got into bed he was aware of Angelica’s scent still clinging faintly to his hair, but it was not Angelica he was thinking about as he switched out the light; it was Simone.

It ought not to have given him such a jolt when Angelica had made that reference to Simone being a twin.

T
WINS. IT HAD given Melissa Anderson a considerable jolt to hear the word, but it had been a very pleasurable jolt.
Twins.

‘And first off, as far as we can tell, they’re both developing at a normal rate,’ said Martin Brannan, regarding her from behind his desk. He was rather nice-looking: dark-haired and with a kind of enthusiastic intensity, and he was a lot younger than Mel had expected. He might be in his early thirties, but no more than that.

‘But?’

He had not moved, but he looked as if he might mentally be taking a deep breath, like a man about to plunge into something dark and cold and unpleasant. Mel waited, and then in a voice that managed to be both professionally detached and humanely compassionate, Martin Brannan said, ‘Mrs Anderson, they’re joined.’

Joined?’ Mel did not immediately take this in. ‘I don’t—Oh. Oh God,
joined
. You mean—like Siamese twins, don’t you?’

‘Well, we don’t call them that any more. We call it conjoining.’

Mel did not care what it was called. She was aware of a rushing sound in her ears, but she fought it back because she would not faint like some helpless wimp, she absolutely would not—

The thing to do was establish the facts—even to write everything down. Joe would want to know details when she got home; he would ask a great many questions and be annoyed if Mel could not supply the answers. The trouble was that she did not think she could hold a pen at the moment, never mind write decipherable notes.

But after a moment she was able to say, ‘You can do something about it, can’t you? There are operations—’ You heard about the operations on TV. Lots of publicity, heart-breaking photographs, newscasters talking in hushed voices, and gruesome reports of eight- and twelve-hour operations. Sometimes one child died at the expense of the other. Sometimes both of them died. And all of it unbearable for the parents. But now I might actually be one of those parents. And Joe? said her mind uneasily. How is Joe going to react to this?

Martin Brannan said, ‘We can’t see as far ahead as an operation, yet. Don’t let’s jump any guns. I expect you know that identical twins develop from a single fertilized egg, don’t you? And they’re always same-sex children for that reason. One theory for conjoined twins is simply that the developing embryo starts to split but stops before the split is quite complete.’

Mel supposed she did know this, in a general sense.

‘We don’t know why that happens yet—although one day we will. Your GP had a suspicion that something wasn’t quite as it should be, which is why he sent you to me. It’s why we’ve done the scan a bit earlier than normal, as well. So, now, the scan indicates that your twins are joined at the chest, fairly high up. That’s what we call thoracopagus twins.’

‘They’re face to face?’ Mel had a swift mental image of the twins curled tightly into a silent embrace.

‘No, not exactly,’ he said. ‘The join is at the side. Fairly high up—around the ribcage.’

‘Side by side.’

‘Yes. The images show that the limbs are all separate and free, though. Does that make you feel any better? It should do, because it makes me feel a whole lot better, I promise. And there seem to be two heart shadows, so they aren’t sharing a single heart—that’s always a massive concern with thoracopagus twins.’

‘How good a chance that there are separate hearts?’

‘A lot better than good.’

‘And the bad side of things?’ I’m doing quite well, thought Mel. I’m being calm and logical, and I’m not embarrassing him with hysterics or faints or anything. But she was aware of a churning panic, and she thought that panic, after today, would smell of the lavender air-freshener somebody had sprayed around this office and the geranium plants that somebody had put on the window-sill to catch the sun.

Brannan took a minute to reply. ‘There’s some fusion of the scapula,’ he said. ‘Around the clavicle—about here.’ He indicated the area just inside his shoulder. It’s not a large area though, and we ought to be able to deal with it. They’ll both have a massive scar afterwards, of course, but we might do a skin graft when they’re older.’ He studied her thoughtfully, and Mel was deeply grateful to him for talking as if it was a foregone conclusion that the twins were going to survive the birth and have the operation, and that they were going to grow up to reach ages where skin grafts could be done.

‘It could be so much worse, you know.’

‘It could?’

‘Oh yes,’ he said, and there was such conviction in his voice that Mel believed him, and did not want to know all the so-much-worse things that she might have had to cope with.

‘Will you—you will be able to separate them all right, won’t you?’

‘It’ll be a difficult and dangerous procedure,’ said Brannan. ‘Because there’s some bone involved—possibly tendons and muscle as well—the separation might leave some damage to one of them. Not necessarily, but possibly.’ He leaned forward. ‘Listen, though, you’re going to hear all kinds of conflicting statistics and stories over the next few months—try to ignore most of them, or ask me for the real information. And remember that thoracopagus twins are by far the easiest to deal with, and that as a rule of thumb more than seventy-five per cent do survive separation.’

‘Both twins?’

‘You’re jumping guns again,’ he said, and then, before Mel could deal with this one, said, ‘D’you want to know the sex of the twins, at all?’

There, not for the first time, was the faintest trace of Irish in his voice. Nice. ‘Are you allowed to tell these days?’

‘The ruling is that we’re not required to tell, but we can use our discretion. But we’ve got the amniocentesis results, so we do know what they are.’

Mel considered, and then said, ‘I’d like to know if I could.’

‘Of course you would. Let’s make them into real people for you. For both of us.’ Again the smile. ‘Two girls,’ he said.

Two girls. Two
girls. Exactly
what I hoped for. Two tiny girls, lying like furled-up buds, clinging on to one another, but their limbs whole and free, and probably each with their own hearts, beating in exact time together.

Mel said, carefully, ‘Two girls,’ and despite everything felt a delighted smile widen her mouth. ‘Oh, thank you.’