Pureheart (11 page)

The ghost child looked up at her uncomprehendingly. It was as if she didn't understand that the memory was a painful one, or that sharing it might cause pain to the onlooker. Then she shrieked with laughter.

‘Well, see this one then –' And the wild little girl who was Deirdre's grandmother seized Gal's hand too and dragged them both to the next room.

There, a fair-haired, dark-eyed girl who could not have been more than sixteen sat on a sofa, her face flushed with shame, her eyes lowered.

‘But she's my baby,' the girl was saying in the softest voice, with the most heart-rending sadness imaginable.

‘You may be capable of conceiving a baby,' said an older woman drily, ‘but you are certainly not capable of looking after one.'

And Deirdre and Gal recognised her at once. It was Deirdre's grandmother, middle-aged, perhaps twenty years ago.

Suddenly the wild little girl, the ghost-child grandmother, gripped their hands and swung madly on their arms. The unexpectedness of this might have pulled them over. But the child had no weight. She kept swinging carelessly as her older self lectured the young shamefaced girl.

‘And I can tell you are not listening,' pursued Deirdre's grandmother twenty years ago. ‘That, my dear, is how you got yourself into this mess. Lord knows I warned you. Now, God help me, you will listen and you will obey, or believe me, you will find the world out there a very cold place indeed.'

The young girl began to cry.

‘Oh, stop it. I'm sick of the sound of you. If you had behaved responsibly this would never have happened in the first place. You have no one but yourself, and that fool you call your boyfriend, to blame, and you are lucky, because you are going to get out of this scot-free. Now, are you going to listen, or are you going to sit there crying over spilt milk?'

The girl fell silent, and bowed her head further.

‘Tomorrow you will pack your bags and go and stay in the country with your aunt. You will wait there until the baby is born. Then you will leave the baby with her and start your senior year at a new school – a boarding school. You will forget all about your boyfriend, and the baby, and you will never attempt to see either of them again. And you will never tell a soul that this happened. Whenever you need to explain your break from school you will say you had rheumatic fever. After a while it will feel like the truth. You will work hard, and get into university. And I will pay. You threw your life away – I am giving it back to you. One day, I assure you, you will thank me.'

The young girl stared up at her, stunned, trying to digest this sudden bleak map of her future.

‘But what will happen to my baby?'

Deirdre's grandmother hesitated for only a moment. Then she smiled an ecstatic, triumphant smile. This seemed to make the girl panic.

‘What are you going to do with it?' she asked again frantically.

‘If I tell, you must promise never to come back here. You have failed me, and for that I will never forgive you – but I am setting you free to live your own life. You may choose your own profession. You may visit your aunt. I will support you financially. But I never want to see you in Corbenic again.'

‘I promise. I promise.
What are you going to do with my baby?
'

‘I shall adopt her myself,' said Deirdre's grandmother simply.

The young girl stared at her as the colour seemed to drain from her face. She opened her mouth, but no words came.

Then suddenly the ghost-child grandmother shrieked with laughter again, and pulled Gal and Deirdre down the hall and into the next room.

‘But I don't understand,' said Deirdre. ‘Who was that girl? Where is the baby now?'

‘Oh, Deirdre,' said the little girl with glee. ‘Have you really not guessed?'

And in the next room they saw Deirdre's grandmother with another woman of about the same age. The other woman held a new baby, and there was a bassinet and a suitcase on the carpet nearby.

‘Here she is,' she said.

She gave the baby gently into Deirdre's grandmother's hungry outstretched arms.

And as Gal and Deirdre looked on, there was a sudden soft glow of light around the action, around the giving of the baby into her arms, as if someone had lit a thousand lanterns. It was like looking at an icon surrounded by a bank of candles, or a scene lit up on stage. It was as if they were seeing how beautiful the memory was to the one remembering it.

Deirdre's grandmother gazed down at the baby adoringly.

‘My baby!' she said. ‘My Deirdre!'

‘Deirdre!' said the other woman, surprised. ‘You're calling her after her mother?'

‘I'm calling her after myself,' Mrs Dark murmured. ‘I was named after Deirdre of the Sorrows – you know the legend? – and my daughter was named after me. We're all Deirdres.' She sighed. ‘But this Deirdre will never leave me,' she said. ‘She won't be interested in boys – she won't be such a fool. We will be everything to each other – always. It will be as if her mother never existed. I will start again with my granddaughter . . .'

And then, for Gal and Deirdre, the other woman seemed to fade into obscurity. There was just Deirdre's grandmother and the little baby, and she was cradling it and murmuring, ‘We'll get them back. We'll get them back, for what they did to me. Not just Father, but all men. Or one, it doesn't really matter. And her, especially her. Elaine. It may take a while, but someone will pay, you'll see. I'll find a way. And you'll be my helper. My special helper. You'll never betray me.

‘I won't let you.'

And suddenly they saw Deirdre's grandmother as a little girl again. She was alone in a room in the semi-dark, the door shut and voices rising and falling outside it. It was easy to see that for some reason she had been sent to her room as a punishment; she was sitting on the floor, hugging her knees, rocking back and forth, her face tear-stained. And she was chanting to herself, over and over, ‘I'll get them back. I'll get them back. I'll get them back. I'll get them back . . .'

‘But I thought my mother ran away and left me,' said Deirdre in a tiny, abandoned voice.

For now she realised that the fair-haired, dark-eyed, shamefaced sixteen year old had been her mother. And now she knew why there had never been any photographs of her on display.

Her ghost-child grandmother laughed. ‘I must have lied to you, then!' she said heartlessly. But then she grew thoughtful. ‘She wasn't wicked, your mother. Just stupid. Like all women. And she did abandon you. She just needed a little pushing. You need not have known. That your mother was a silly little slut, I mean. Ignorance is bliss, you know, especially where one's parents are concerned. But you would bring him here. You would act just like her. You brought it on yourself.' And she stared again with pure hatred at Gal.

‘Well, don't stand around gawping!' she added gaily, grabbing their hands. ‘I have so much more to show you!
Seeing as you're here
 . . .'

And with a terrifying strength, she managed to pull them out of the room, down the hall, and round the next corner . . .

Until Gal came to his senses, stopped and simply pulled his hand free. Swiftly he grabbed Deirdre's other hand. Her head span round and her eyes searched his face wildly and for a terrible moment he thought that between them, he and her little ghost-child grandmother were going to tear Deirdre apart.

And he knew that this tug-of-war had been going on for all their lives.

But then Deirdre fell back towards him and he reached out and grabbed her as if he had rescued her from death itself.

‘You don't have to follow her!' he said. ‘This has got to stop. She's just torturing you, Deirdre!'

Deirdre was holding her head, as if it was aching.

‘My poor mother,' she was whispering.

‘She's torturing both of us,' Gal said, thinking uneasily about the baby he had seen Elaine give away – his relative, the ghost child had said. Then, mentally, he shook himself free. Or tried to. ‘None of this matters. She's just using it to hold on to her power. We're not here to relive her life. We have to keep searching for our own.'

But Deirdre was staring down at her hand. There was an injury on it, four livid parallel scratches.

She had felt the little hand around her own, colder than the hand of any human child, gripping, pulling harder and harder, as Gal had pulled her from the other side. The ghost child's hand had been desperate with need, with fear, with loneliness, and Deirdre had known that all of the little creature's strength was being poured into that grip. And although she felt Gal pulling her other hand, she could not deny the child what she wanted, she could not find it in her heart to pull away from her.

But Gal was stronger. And so as their hands had finally slipped apart, Deirdre had felt the sudden sting of the child's four fingernails along the length of her palm, and worse, felt the anguish of her defeat.

She wanted to feel happy that Gal had won. She wanted to feel happy that she was with him, that she belonged to life, not death. But she couldn't; she couldn't. Not while the ghost-child grandmother still wandered Corbenic.

She had not really let go at all.

‘There's something I have to tell you,' muttered Deirdre. ‘Something you have to know. She's torturing us, but she's telling the truth.'

Her ghost-child grandmother had disappeared up ahead of them somewhere, but Deirdre felt listened to, spied upon, constrained. And – disloyal.

‘I could tell you her story. I know it backwards. I've heard it over and over, again and again, the same terrible tales, until I thought I would go mad from hearing them.

‘But none of the details really matter. Only one thing matters, Gal: that poor little frightened girl – that poor little frightened girl inside my grandmother. Do you see what I mean?'

Gal's face was stony. That poor little frightened girl was the monster he wanted to free Deirdre from. His anger was too deep and too well justified to forgive her so easily. Deirdre gazed into his eyes. Then she sighed.

‘My grandmother,' she began, ‘was born in Corbenic, when Corbenic was still a house, before her father built the rest of the flats around it. And before she started adding to it. Corbenic was built in stages, you know. That year, 1936, on the glass door in the entrance, was when my great-grandfather finally completed them. His version of them. But they'd been a good business for years before that. So my grandmother was born in the oldest part of this building. But her mother, my great-grandmother, died when she was born. My grandmother's own grandmother looked after her when she was a baby. But then her grandmother died too. And then Grandmother's father – my great-grandfather – met Elaine.'

Gal placed his palms across his face.

‘I know. I know. I know,' he said from behind them. He said it wearily, but not without sympathy. ‘And she felt abandoned. And it was horrible. And she never got over it.'

But Deirdre wasn't listening.

‘Elaine was old by the time we met her, of course,' she said. ‘It had all happened so long ago! But I wasn't allowed to know her. Grandmother told her to keep away from us. This is a big building – it's quite possible for someone to live here and never meet anyone they don't want to meet. Elaine had been living here since my great-grandfather died, and that was years before I was born. My great-grandfather had left her a flat, and she had just stayed on.

‘Grandmother hated Elaine. From the day she first met her, until the end of her life. When Great-grandfather took up with Elaine he neglected my grandmother – travelled the world with Elaine – that was Corbenic's heyday, and there was money to burn – and, yes, my grandmother felt abandoned. She was abandoned. She never forgave my great-grandfather. She loved him so much, you see. And she never forgave Elaine, because she stole him away. That's really how it all started. Her unhappiness, I mean. And her hatred of men.

‘And she did hate men, you know. They had hurt her so badly.

‘When she was sixteen she ran away to get married – she was desperate to get out of this place, with her father and his mistress making the rules. But she wasn't happy. And it didn't last. She had a little boy, a beautiful little boy, who died. She never got over that, either. It was horrible. And it was another reason to hate Elaine, because Elaine had a little boy too – my grandmother's half-brother. And he lived.'

Deirdre paused and gazed searchingly at Gal. Then her thoughts seemed to drift back to the story of her grandmother's life.

‘Then, years later, she had my mother,' she said sadly. ‘And then her husband left her. And when my great-grandfather died she moved back here. And changed her name back to Dark. She adored my mother. But when my mother got pregnant with me, my grandmother was so disappointed that she never forgave her. My mother was just a teenager, you see, and my grandmother had had such high hopes for her. I knew all that.

‘But my grandmother always told me I was abandoned, that my mother had just run away and left me, and that she had never heard from her again. I never knew my grandmother sent my mother to boarding school, and took me away from her, and told her never to come back . . .'

‘But you're not angry with her? Why aren't you angry with her?'

‘Oh, Gal, you don't understand. You think she's a bully, and she is. Was. But there was a reason she bullied us. It was because she was afraid. I was all she had. I was so precious to her. I've never understood before just how desperate she was to keep me for herself.' And again, suddenly, she searched Gal's face with her eyes. ‘How do you leave someone who needs you so badly, Gal? How do you do it?'

And Gal could find nothing to say in reply.

‘After Grandmother banished you, all through those years before I started at the high school, she got stranger and stranger. She kept telling me the story of her life, over and over again. And she couldn't stop building. The whole town was talking about it. The business was failing – she had fewer and fewer tenants, and she had to make the rents lower and lower, because she would never spend any money on the upkeep of the building. There were so many things that needed fixing, but she wouldn't fix them. Instead she used the money her father left her to build more and more extensions – stairs and hallways and landings and vestibules – and yet none of them had any function. She made Corbenic into a labyrinth. It must be twice the size it was when you lived here. The yard is gone now. The building covers it.'

‘But why?' said Gal. ‘Why did she keep on building?'

Deirdre stared at him.

‘It was as if she was trying to protect herself from something, get away from something, put distance between herself and something. It was as if she was burying something beneath more and more layers of stairways and halls and landings. It was as if she was building a fortress. It was as if she was running from something and the extensions were the path of her flight.

‘Gal, there is something in the building, something my grandmother is terrified of. And I think it must be the thing we found when we were five. The most important thing. The thing we can't remember. The thing you were banished over. The thing we're looking for now. Even now, she wants to destroy it. She wants it to be lost forever.'

Gal stared at her, digesting what she'd said. He was beginning to understand, better than he'd ever understood before. But . . .

There was something nagging at him, something important that he couldn't quite grasp. And yet he couldn't put his finger on it.

Then suddenly he said, ‘So what happened to Elaine's baby, the little boy your grandmother was jealous of?'

‘Oh, Gal,' said Deirdre sadly. ‘That's what I needed to tell you. Haven't you guessed yet? He was your father. You are Lainey's grandson. That's why my grandmother hated you so much.'

For a moment Gal thought he might be going to faint. For a moment the whole world turned upside down.

He put a hand out to steady himself against the wall, and remembered, as he did so, the bizarre fact that the building was in the process of collapsing around him.

He had always known that he was related to Deirdre; he had always known that he was related to her grandmother – his surname, like theirs, was Dark. But no one had ever told him how. If he had thought about it at all, he had imagined the relationship to be a distant one.

Now he realised that Deirdre and he were descended from the same man; that her great-grandfather was his father's father.

Now he knew that, in old-fashioned terms, his father was illegitimate.

And now, for the first time, he understood something Deirdre's grandmother had said to him, long ago, during that argument, when she had said his family was not trustworthy, and he had argued that she and he were from the same one.

‘
Yes, but you're from the funny side of it, aren't you? The wrong side of the sheets. Little bastard . . .
'

Suddenly a hundred things made sense; a hundred small mysteries were solved. For if Elaine was his grandmother, he saw how, in Deirdre's grandmother's eyes, he had inherited her guilt. Even worse, he saw how he had inherited her father's guilt, for in a way he was the product of it – the descendant of it. He was the male she could punish for her father's sins, in her father's stead. And if that wasn't enough, there was the rivalry over Deirdre, the most precious thing in her life. He was trying to steal Deirdre away from her. He was her natural enemy.

But then he remembered something else the ghost child had said.
He's the reason I took my revenge on you.

What did she mean by her revenge?

What was it she had done?

He felt a coldness near him, as if someone had opened a window onto an icy winter's night. He glanced up. And when he did, he saw something that frightened him so much he felt for a moment as if he was losing his mind.

It was her. It was the ghost-child grandmother. She was standing in front of him. But her feet were so far from the ground their faces were level, and when he looked in her eyes he saw death, death, death.

Her face was a kaleidoscope again, one moment a child's, one moment an old woman's, one moment that of a corpse in the grave. She had crept back while they were talking. She had been listening quietly to what they were saying, although she looked puzzled, as if, like a five year old, she couldn't completely follow the drift of their conversation.

‘You didn't come,' she said, like a little girl who had been waiting too long to be found in a game of hide-and-seek. ‘Why didn't you come? I've got something else to show you. The best thing of all.'