Naomi's Room (17 page)

They were having dinner when I called. Carol answered the phone and spoke with me for a while, telling me how much she thought Laura had improved, how much good the break had done her. Then Laura herself came to the phone.

‘How are you, darling?’ I asked. ‘Carol says you’re feeling a lot better.’

‘Much, much better, dear. Carol has been an angel. And helping her look after Jessica has been a great help.’

Jessica, Carol’s three-year-old daughter, was the result of a disastrous affair with a married man, a local building contractor with seven other children. Jessica, however, was not a disaster. She was adorable and adored, and if she had wrought a change in Laura, that was hardly a cause for surprise.

‘Charles,’ Laura continued without stopping, ‘I want to come home. I want us both to go back to the house.’

‘To the house . . . ? But, Laura, you know why we can’t do that, you know what happened.’

‘I know, I know all about that, but it’s going to be all right. Honestly it is. We’ve been making a mistake, a terrible mistake. There’s nothing to be frightened of, quite the contrary.’ Her voice fell almost to a whisper. ‘Darling, I’ve not told Carol this, I’ve not told anyone.’ There was a long hesitation, then she spoke in a sudden rush. ‘I saw Naomi. Here, last night, in my bedroom. She spoke to me, Charles, Naomi spoke to me.’

A shudder passed through me. ‘Help me, Daddy. Help me.’ The words echoed through my head.

‘Darling . . .’

‘No, it’s all right, I’m all right. I haven’t been hallucinating, I really saw her. You can’t find that hard to believe, not after the things we saw, not after the photographs and everything. You do believe me, don’t you?’

My blood had gone cold, cold as ice. I believed her, God knows I did, why wouldn’t I?

‘She says we have to go back. She says she misses me, misses us both, she can’t sleep or rest or anything until we’re with her again.’

‘Darling, ghosts don’t sleep.’

‘How do you know what they do? Maybe they have lives just like ours. She’s our child, Charles, no matter what has happened to her, she is still our child. Or have you forgotten?’

‘No, I’ve not forgotten, love. How could I have forgotten that? It’s just that . . .’

Laura butted in as though she had not heard.

‘She says we have to go back, that nothing bad will happen to us. All that talk about evil forces, that’s just that dreadful Welshman, that photographer. You know I never liked him from the beginning. I . . .’

‘He’s dead, Laura. Lewis is dead. I’ve just come back from London. He was found murdered last night. In an alley in Spitalfields, near where Naomi . . .’

She cut me off again.

‘I’m sorry to hear that, Charles. Really I am. But I don’t see how that changes anything. I believe Naomi. She says Carol and Jessica have to come as well. Carol has already agreed. She doesn’t know why I want her to come, of course; but she says she has lots of paperwork that can be done anywhere and that she could do with help with Jessica for the next fortnight. So it all works out perfectly. You’ll see. There won’t be a thing to worry about. We’ll be coming tomorrow on the twelve-fifteen train. Can you be at the station? Or shall we get a taxi?’

I said nothing. I was so cold, I felt as though I had bathed naked in the purest ice.

‘Aren’t you happy that I’m coming home, darling? Aren’t you?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, of course I am. Why wouldn’t I be?’

But I was cold, so very, very cold.

They arrived the next day as promised. Everyone looked well. I played my part, picking up their luggage and driving them home like a dutiful husband and brother. We drew up outside the house as though nothing had happened, as though we had never been away. As we went in, I looked up at the attic window. There was no movement. Everything was still.

Laura seemed happy still, buoyed up by her newfound devotion to Jessica. Lewis’s death seemed to have affected her not in the least. But, then, she hadn’t known him as I had. I decided to tell her nothing about the Spitalfields connections, about finding Liddley’s burial place. Maybe she was right, maybe all we needed was a chance to let things settle. Others had lived in the house before us without anything terrible happening, as far as I knew.

Talking to Carol over coffee, I realized that she knew nothing of what had been going on. She simply assumed that the strain after Naomi’s death had proved too much for both of us and that we had needed some time apart. Perfectly natural, perfectly understandable in the circumstances. Why are some people so infuriatingly understanding? For all that, I hoped nothing would happen to disabuse her of her fancy.

I left the three of them in the house that afternoon and returned to Downing. The discovery of Liddley’s tomb had only served to whet my appetite to know more of him. I spent three hours going over his letters, becoming intimate with his cramped but learned hand, his curious turns of phrase, his classicism. His correspondents were diverse in background, but not in temperament. Without knowledge of its ultimate purpose, life became meaningless, insipid, ultimately unsupportable. Only the man of courage, the man whose whole being had been tempered by suffering, could attain true wisdom and, from there, reach perfect knowledge.

‘The ordinary people, the commonality have no apprehension of such knowledge, nor do they strive after it or respect it,’ wrote one correspondent, a doctor of theology at the University of Leiden. ‘We, on the other hand, being privy to these arcane secrets, to the seed of that Universal Gnosis wherein lies the germ of All Things, may consider ourselves risen above the hopes and sentimentalities of the common herd.

‘Their morality, a small, cringing observance, a matter of custom and not of principle, we may hold for the nothing it is in truth. Rise above it, and you will see open about you hills and valleys of true behaviour and right action. A man may lie with a woman not his by law and yet garner sweetnesses above the pleasures of the marriage-bed. He may take that which is not his and yet confer a most estimable benefit upon its supposed owner. He may kill and yet bring life to his own soul and quicken thereby his own perfection and his love of Wisdom.’

There was more, much more, in the same vein. Those of Liddley’s replies that have survived – he appears to have been meticulous at one stage in keeping copies of everything he wrote – were couched in similar language. I began to discern a pattern, a thirst, something that hinted – and at times more than hinted – at the desperation of a man who feels himself fettered, yet thinks he can smell the air of open fields and longs to run in them.

The letters were suggestive, but they touched only on the edges of Liddley’s nightmare. Was it his search for knowledge and meaning that had driven him to his final darkness, or something else? I wanted an answer, and now I began once more to despair of finding one.

It was as I was preparing to pack up and leave that I made the discovery which was to lead me to the truth – or as much of the truth as I could ever hope to come by. I put the letters back inside their box, tied it with ribbon, and put it to one side. Next to it was another box, from which I had taken several notebooks, none of which I had yet looked at. As I began to replace them, my eye fell on one which was rather different to the others: a small, leather-bound volume bearing the inscription,
Clinical Reports 1838–47
, I had thought nothing of it, taking it for no more than a continuation of the earlier notes assembled by Liddley in his first years as a practitioner. But now, picking it up, I glanced idly inside.

The handwriting was unmistakably Liddley’s. The entries were laid out by date, but the first passage on which my eye fell did not read like a medical report. I think it must have been the name Sarah that alerted me to the fact that this notebook contained something more personal than the others. A few minutes later, I was in an ecstasy of nervous excitement. The title was a deception: what I held in my hands was nothing other than John Liddley’s personal diary.

It was almost closing-time. The library was empty, I was seated by a pool of yellow light on my own. Burnett had gone into the stacks to replace volumes consulted during the day. It was a matter of moments for me to slip the diary into my briefcase, collect the other notebooks, and shuffle them back inside their box. A minute later, Burnett came back. I handed him the boxes. He scarcely looked at them. Two boxes borrowed, two boxes returned. We chatted for a few minutes about nothing of consequence, and I left. In those days, as now, Cambridge operated on a basis of trust. Senior members of the University Library did not require tickets to gain admission to the library, colleges were even more lax. Academics are not thieves until caught
in flagrante.
I was not caught.

When I returned home, supper was ready. The table was aflame with candles. Red candles, chosen as though for some festivity, for the Christmas lunch we had never eaten. The house seemed more normal than it had done in months. There was not that weight on it, that sense of oppression and regret with which Laura and I had filled it.

My wife and sister had spent the afternoon cleaning, playing with Jessica, cooking. They made a thing of it, they said it brought them together, two women and a girl-child making order of their lives. I felt excluded, even shunned. From the moment I set foot through the door, I felt as though my home had been taken away from me, I felt insecurity rise up in me like a bubble.

Laura was positively radiant, a new person, a resurrectee. She was so with Carol and Jessica, at least – her manner with me, her husband, was more reserved. I felt she resented my having gone out after her return, as though I had snubbed her, when in fact all I had been doing was to make her safe by tracking Liddley down. She looked at me during the meal, casting odd, sidelong glances in my direction as though I was a stranger and she was having second thoughts about having invited me into her home.

Jessica was wearing a pink dress identical to one Naomi had owned: I remembered that Carol had bought them both matching outfits during her visit before Christmas. I considered it thoughtless of Carol to have let her daughter sit at my table wearing clothes that were so redolent with memory. At moments my eyes blurred and I thought I could see Naomi in Jessica’s place. They were cousins after all, they were so alike.

I made a hasty meal and left them to it, to the slowly melting candles and their charmless chatter. A lawyer and an art historian rabbiting on about babies. They seemed to look oddly at me as I left the room, as I though I had said or done something untoward. But I ignored them. I was eager for my prize.

I went to the study and opened my briefcase. There it was on the desk at last, the key I had been seeking all this time. It was a rare excitement I felt then, during those first minutes with the good doctor’s memories. But as I read, excitement gave way to apprehension, then to pity, and, finally, to horror. I understood John Liddley as I have never understood anyone.

When I finished reading, it was late. I had heard Carol and Laura go to bed an hour or two earlier. The house was very still. I became aware for the first time that the study was cold. I sat without moving in my chair, hunched over the desk, my eyes on the cover of the diary. It had told me all I wanted to know. I knew why he had killed them, how he had done it. I even thought I knew what had happened in Spitalfields.

I did not question what I had to do. Taking the diary in my hands, I stood and went quietly to the lounge. Laura and Carol had left a low fire burning in the fireplace. It was almost dead. I poked it and added some logs, and in a few minutes it had started to blaze again.

Once it was truly alight, I took the diary and tore out its pages. They took easily to the flames, burning fiercely before crumpling to black ashes. When I had finished, I went outside and threw the leather binding into the dustbin. I smelled the night air, shivering, then went inside.

Laura was asleep, her breathing audible from the moment I entered the darkened room. I undressed and got into bed beside her. Her back was turned to me, and I felt immeasurably relieved that I would not have to talk to her, lie to her. I lay awake in the darkness, no longer imagining, but knowing, what had happened in this house. Here, in this room, and above in the attic.

The beginning of it all was Liddley’s attachment to his daughters’ governess, Miss Sarfatti. Her first name was Anna. She was a woman of obscure origins, and not even Liddley had been able to extract from her more than the minimum of information regarding herself. She was not of English parentage, though she had been brought up in this country. Even her nationality is unclear: Sarfatti is not an Italian surname, and I have been unable to discover its true provenance.

Judging from Liddley’s description, Anna Sarfatti was a very beautiful woman. ‘I cannot describe my pleasure on first seeing her,’ he wrote in his diary – the words have remained with me – ‘It was as though I had passed through a door and entered a room quite different to the one in which I had been, a room whose dimensions, whose light, whose colours were wholly unlike those of any in which I had ever been or hoped to enter. I am entranced. Her eyes entrance me, her ears, her lips, her neck, the way she pauses in the midst of speech when seeking the right word. She is hesitant, demure, yet forthright and honest. I love her, yet to say so falls far short of what I know and what I feel. She will reveal to me all those things that have thus far been veiled from my eyes.’

The doctor’s infatuation grew rapidly to obsession. His wife must have known of it: I fail to see how she could not, and Liddley himself suspected as much. On one occasion, Sarah did try to have the governess dismissed, but her husband overruled her and Anna stayed. At first, Liddley kept his distance, admiring, lovesick, but loyal to the wife he had married without affection. Gradually, however, his need for Anna became too powerful to resist. His correspondents were telling him that it was proper to scorn the petty morality of the masses, his instincts were urging him to bed the beautiful woman whom he met and talked with every day. And she, it seems, was not unwilling.