Death be Not Proud (4 page)

“Quite sure,” I said firmly. “I'm starting work again – you know how it gets under my skin.”

“Oh, Emma, that's wonderful.” She rose from the table and came over and kissed me on the forehead, her hands around my glowing face. I felt the slow creep of guilt but pushed it away before it could get a hold; she didn't need to know anything that would destroy her happiness at this moment.

“But I might spend an awful lot of time on research; you won't worry, will you?”

“Darling, no, of course not.” She seemed genuinely pleased and I hugged her.

Dad still regarded my sudden zeal with caution; he hadn't yet told my mother about my conversation with the mice, and I hoped that he wouldn't feel the need to any time soon. “What are you researching?” he asked.

“The journal.”

“Ah, that.” He looked both relieved and gloomy at the same time. The journal had been a constant in our family since long before my birth, and he viewed it almost as a rival. I picked up my empty plate and glass.

“Leave that, darling; we'll clear up. You go and get on with your work.” Mum took them from me as I began to argue, and pushed me gently towards the door of the room. “Just don't overdo it; you know what you're like. And Mike said you need to rest,” she called after me as I disappeared around the curve of the staircase. “He said you're not as strong as you think…”

But her words were lost as I passed beyond earshot, already travelling back in time and into another life.

I raked the internet for any more information I could find on the athletics team, but they seemed to have disappeared from view. I sat back in my desk chair and rocked onto the back legs, chewing the end of my pen.

Stalemate.

I went through what I knew and realized that it amounted to very little. I contemplated the ceiling and the fine web of cracks that ran all over it, noting that it was in need of redecoration. At times like these, when seemingly faced with a dead-end, I made lists.

I opened up a blank page on the screen and began randomly, letting my ideas begin to flow before attempting to arrange them in something resembling order. After a page, I stopped again, rising abruptly from my chair and stomping around my room with my hands on my head, trying not to verbalize my thoughts above a whisper. I returned to the desk and reviewed what I had written: disparate facts without a pattern, which all added up to a bunch of nothing.

I looked at the disjointed, jumbled mess on the screen and it mirrored the inside of my head. I wanted to go out and walk it through, but dark smothered day, and the fog had been replaced by a steady rain.

I unplugged the laptop and carried it over to my bed, sitting cross-legged in the middle of it, and tried again. Wrapping my blue blanket around my shoulders, smelling the faint scent of my apartment in its wool, picturing us together again, brought spasms of loneliness, and I hurriedly readjusted the image in my mind and focused on the ragged thoughts, trying to pin them down like random butterflies. After what I had done to him, I couldn't be sure that Matthew would still feel the same way about me and, even if he did, whether he would – could – ever trust me again. Could I trust myself?

Mike Taylor had a point; in the States events had piled up one on top of the other in such rapid succession that I had no time to stop and think things through. In a few short weeks I experienced a tangle of emotions: doubt, fear, love – all equally intense, and underpinned by raw pain, so I could no longer tell where one ended and the other began. I fled from Maine because I had nowhere else to go: emotionally it became a fight-or-flight situation, or perhaps, more accurately, a case of retreat, retrench and regroup. Now that I was able to sit back and contemplate and process all the information without distractions, what had appeared peculiar in the States now seemed downright bizarre.

Looking back on it, the confrontation with Sam was wholly predictable, and I could almost understand Staahl's attack if I accepted it as insanity. But Matthew was another matter. Perhaps because he seemed so normal, his anomalies stood out, as if he were playing a role all the time, a charade. If he was as old as the photograph suggested, then what? If Mike really had spoken to him thirty years ago, what did that lead me to conclude? It made nonsense of everything I thought I had begun to understand. Did it make a mockery of me as well? Did he laugh at me behind my back, call me
a fool for not seeing the blindingly obvious, if only I scratched the surface and peered beneath it a little harder?

Who
was he?
What
was he? If human – good grief! – that was an avenue I fought shy of exploring –
if
human, he must have been born somewhere and at some time, and he would have had parents, possibly siblings. A sudden rattle followed by scratching noises from behind my head brought me back to reality with the night antics of the resident mice. I thumped on the wall half-heartedly and the scuttling stopped just long enough for me to imagine them cocking their heads before they ignored me as usual, and continued their game of running up and down inside the framework of the old wall.

What did I have at the moment? His name and three dates – consistent in the 1930s, 1970s and 2000s. And possibly – just possibly – a country. He sounded too English not to be, despite the slight American accent that all but disappeared when we were alone together. His reaction to being asked about his name, the mention of his colouring – although little in themselves – when put together added up to a big heap of… what? If I took another, say, twenty to thirty years off 1932 – it would give a birth date of around 1900 to 1910. So, that was where I would start; I needed to look for references in the UK or the US about a hundred years ago. If I treated this as any other research project, applied the same methods, the same rules, I might be able to get closer to the “
Who?
”

That would only leave me with the “
What?
” – and that was too big to contemplate, too scary to consider. And without the
who
and the
what
, I had nowhere to go with this relationship. Matthew might as well be a figment of my imagination, as solid as grasping at air.

I pressed my fingers against the bruises his lips had made on my skin, and felt with relief – with gladness – the
welcome twinge of pain it brought, because it made him
real
. I laughed out loud at the thought: a relationship? I could no more contemplate a relationship with a man about whom I knew nothing except that he shouldn't exist, than I could with a phantom.

A ghost, yet as substantial as me? No. An alien? A Time Lord? Something from another world or a freak of nature? For an instant I considered whether he might be dredged up from the underworld, a demon disguised, but instantly knew it not to be the case with a certainty beyond understanding. I pressed my cross to my lips and strained to hear the guiding voice again, but my own thoughts drowned it out. Matthew had said it was something I should be scared of, or something that he thought would scare me. Would his age be enough to frighten me? Not really; I lived so thoroughly in the past that at times I found it a wrench to leave it and come back to the present. If anything, what worried me most was not who or what he was, but that I didn't care about it as much as I should. I should be running scared. I should – were I sane – reject him and save my own skin and sanity. I shouldn't be sitting here in the twenty-first century thinking how long it would be before I would see my anomaly again. That posed another question – and one which I found potentially far more frightening: had I lost my mind?

The possibility alarmed my parents. It lay behind the young doctor's eyes in the hospital, and framed Mike Taylor's questions earlier today. Could they see something I missed in myself? Had I spent so much time in the company of the dead that I could no longer relate to the living? Had so much happened to me in the past weeks that I sought refuge in the solitary confinement of my mind? And would I know if that were the case? Would I care?

Of some facts I could be certain: that Matthew Lynes existed in the present seemed evident enough. That he practised medicine – without doubt. I knew he had been married and I had met his niece and nephew, but what else? Could I be confident that the photograph in the newspaper was indeed Matthew? Could it be coincidence that several years before my birth, Mike had seen a man – a doctor – who looked like Matthew and shared his name? Had I imagined his strength, his speed, or the moving lights like flames in his eyes? Did he eat and sleep as I did, and mere chance prevented me from seeing him do so? Had the bear rent his jacket and a miracle saved Matthew's skin from being torn from his back, and his life with it? Where, on this sweet earth, did the boundary lie between reality, certainty, sanity and what I had found in this strange man? And where, on that frontier, did I sit?

 

I raised my head at the sound of footsteps outside my door and covered my face with as near normal a smile as I could muster as my mother came in bearing a tray.

“Darling, I can't see a thing – put the light on,
please
!”

I hadn't noticed I had been sitting in the dark, the light from the laptop casting a lurid glow against the walls. I switched on the bedside light and its muted terracotta shade warmed the room instantly. The fork rattled against the glass on the tray as my mother set it down on the bed in front of my crossed legs. I steadied the glass as it slid precariously to the edge of the tray, and put it on the bedside table.

“Mum, you didn't have to bring this up – I'd have come down for supper.”

“I called and called but you didn't answer, so it was much easier to bring this to you and save my voice. I need the exercise anyway. Are you engrossed?”

“I must have been. I didn't hear you, sorry.” I listened to myself, and wondered if what I said could be interpreted as a sign of madness.

She squeezed my arm. “Not to worry, darling; I'll never know how you can expect to hear anything, let alone think when you're plugged into your music machine.”

She twanged the long cord of my earphones hanging around my neck; I had forgotten it was there.

“It helps me concentrate. Thanks for bringing my supper up – it looks good.”

I picked up the fork with what I hoped looked like eager anticipation, but my mother continued to sit on the edge of my bed, her hand still resting on my arm.

“What is it, Mum?”

She played with the edge of my sleeve, tidying the cuff so that it sat neatly against my bandaged wrist.

“Guy phoned today; your father spoke to him.”

She pulled a stray hair out of the weave. I put my fork back down on the plate abruptly, the noise cold.

“And?”

“He'd heard you'd had problems in America, and he wanted to know how you are.”

“I hope Dad told him everything's just
fine
,” I said, with an undercurrent of a threat.

“Yes, but he still wants to see you. He wants to come over.”

I shoved the tray angrily to one side. “Not a chance. No way. Get Dad to phone him back; I don't want him anywhere near me. I've got enough to deal with at the moment.”

“That's what your father told him,” she said quietly.

“He did?”

“Don't underestimate your father, Emma. I know he gets it wrong sometimes – well, quite often – but he's on your
side, don't forget that. He didn't get to know you like I did; we grew up together, didn't we? He never had that, so you're still a bit of a mystery to him. But he's making a real effort at the moment, and he knows that he was wrong about Guy and wrong about how he handled the situation with you, too.”

My shoulders slumped, my anger deflated like a pot going off the boil.

“Oh.”

“Another thing…” she said, seeing my defences down, “Beth's been asking how you are and she's been over a few times; now you're feeling a bit more like yourself, perhaps you can get together? You haven't seen Archie for months and he's gorgeous – all red hair and dimples.”

“Poor child…” I began, and she looked at me reprovingly. “Yes, all right, I'll see them. I know all this has made me… oh, I don't know… too self-obsessed, I suppose. You must think I'm barking.”

I glanced swiftly at my mother and, catching the hint of a frown, suspected I was right.

“She'll be at the coffee shop tomorrow, if that's any help,” she suggested.

Game, set and match to my mother – as proficient off the court as on it. She had accomplished exactly what she wished to achieve without so much as a murmur from me.

“OK, I'll see how I get on here,” I acquiesced without making any promises, and she smiled her golden smile, where her face lit up and the tired years fell from it, softening the lines. I put my arms around her, trying not to thump her with my cast. “I don't know how you put up with me, but thank you, anyway.”

“You have your grandfather's passion and your father's determination – how could I not put up with you? All I ask
for, darling, is that you allow yourself to be happy; just for once, let happiness find you.”

I unfolded myself from around her.

“And there's no need to look at me like that, Emma; you have a knack of pushing people away and keeping them at a distance – and you know you do.”

“Circumstances and complications,” I muttered.

“Well, perhaps, but you have a part to play too. Sometimes you have to make things happen.”

She regarded me with her deep, wise eyes, but I couldn't tell her what I wanted more than anything at this moment, because it registered off the scale of absurdity and I was trying to be normal – if such a thing existed.

“Now eat, before your food get cold. I don't want your father fussing any more about you not eating enough.”

 

Sharp shafts of sunlight drove across the steeple of St Mary's, irradiating the stone in shades of pale gold that lit the dark canyons of the ancient streets below. Arrows of light glanced off the soft greyed stone roofs where – wet from last night's rain – the sun caught the surface. I had been awake when the rain stopped sometime in the middle of the night, and still tossed fitfully as I listened to the first calling of the morning birds as the sun rose.

I took a bath, one limb at a time, when I thought that the sound of my clumsy splashing would alert no suspicion from my parents because of the early hour.

By the time the great church bell struck seven, I decided that the only way forward would be to approach the whole subject of Matthew Lynes as one of historical research and to do what I did best – methodically, thoroughly and dispassionately. I would begin with what little I had –
his name – and the few dates and, like a tapestry, weave the multicoloured strands into a picture I could understand. And then? And then I would see where those strands led me.

Scooping the last of his special porridge made with raisins and ginger into his spoon, Dad broke through my reverie.

“Are you seeing Beth today?”

Bother, I'd forgotten
. “I'll pop down to the coffee shop after breakfast,” I said, a tad too brightly to be real; he raised a heavy eyebrow.

“While you're there, pick up a couple of croissants, will you, please?”

Reaching into his pocket, he retrieved his wallet, handing over a pristine five-pound note and ensuring I went. Much more subtle than usual, he must have been taking lessons from my mother.