‘I hope I didn’t mention the three murders I committed?’
‘Three? You only mentioned two. But you can tell me about the other one next time. If there is a next time?’
‘Yes, please.’
He left it at that. By the time he was shaved and dressed and had packed his travelling-bag, she was sitting demurely on the bed, which she had made, finishing her coffee. He checked that his notes were in the bag, then remembered the short story Mickey Deans had given him. He packed the two copies of it with a certain trepidation. He still didn’t know what he was going to say about it. He put his jacket on.
‘Can I drop you?’ he said.
Her eyes widened as she looked at him.
‘Somewhere,’ he said, spreading his hands. ‘In a taxi.’
She smiled. That smile could become addictive, he thought.
‘You afraid I’ll ransack the house if you leave me here alone?’
‘Anything you take will be doing me a favour. It’s mostly stuff I can’t be bothered to throw out. I’m just trying to be polite.’
‘After last night, why bother?’
He laughed.
‘Okay. I’ve ordered a taxi. I have to go now. I’ll be happy to drop you at your place if you want. If not, stay here the weekend. My dumpster is your dumpster.’
‘I’ll leave with you,’ she said.
‘You want my number?’
‘I have it.’
‘You’re some machine.’
The taxi sounded its horn and he gestured that he would follow her. At the bottom of the stairs she picked up the mail and passed it to him.
‘Three letters,’ she said. ‘Impressive.’
‘A thin day, my dear,’ he said pompously.
He noted that one was from a publisher. It had a red square on the front advertising a new novel. Surely they wouldn’t have the insensitivity to do that if they were rejecting his novel. He knew the thought was nonsense but he indulged it the way he had indulged himself long ago in avoiding stepping on the cracks in the pavement before an exam. He didn’t know who the other two letters were from. One had a typed address. The other was handwritten in impeccable script. He put all three in his inside pocket. Poste restante. To be left until called for. He decided to try not to open any of them till the weekend was over. If he could fulfil that promise to himself, he decided, the news would be good.
Two
One of the problems nowadays with Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – Andrew Lawson was saying in his not unattractively portentous voice – is that it is familiar to us before we have read it. Mr Hyde has become a cliché of antisocial behaviour. Everybody knows one. Like Don Quixote or Hamlet, he has entered popular culture by a kind of osmosis. We feel we know him before we ever meet him. It is hard to come at him fresh. We may lessen the impact of the book because of the flabby assumptions we bring to it. But try to imagine the shock of his sudden appearance in Victorian society.
Open-mouthed, Marion pushed the pause button on her tape-recorder, as if enacting the shock Andrew Lawson was talking about. Someone was trying the door of her room. She was sure she had seen the handle turn. She thought she might also have heard the infinitesimal, flat click of a lock refusing to yield.
She was sitting cross-legged on the bed in her pyjamas with the lights out. The moonlight that infiltrated the thin curtains made a daguerreotype of the room. The impression had been pleasing to her, as if she were sitting inside a nineteenth-century photograph, had re-entered the time in which this building was conceived. She had been imagining the ghosts of old inhabitants wandering the corridors, while the deep voice on the tape seemed to be talking of an era when they would have done so in the flesh. It had been an eerie feeling.
Suddenly, imagined eeriness had become real, and with it her fear. She had been gazing abstractedly at the door, listening to the hypnotic sound, when the handle had turned. Her finger had pressed automatically on the machine, erasing the voice as if it had been a medium calling up dead spirits.
Holding her breath, she continued to stare at the handle. It turned again. She managed not to call out. She forced herself to go on staring at the door-handle. Very slowly, nothing happened.
She looked at her watch. 2.15. Well into Sunday. She wondered who could be trying her door at this time. If it had been Vikki, she would surely have knocked. There was no one she could think of. There was no reason she could think of. She laid the tape-recorder on the bed and very quietly crossed towards the door, wincing at the creaking moan a floorboard made under the carpet, like the sound of the past buried in modernity but not yet dead. Crouched at the door, she listened. The only thing to disturb her was her breathing.
Very carefully she tried to release the lock, her tongue sticking out as if the elaborate expression of a dread might forestall its consequences. The lock clicked softly, reverberating like a rifle shot in her head. She clenched the handle, leaning instantly against the door to withstand any sudden pressure from the other side. She turned the handle slowly. She pulled the door open. There was nothing in front of her but blank wall.
It was a nondescript off-white, she noticed. The thought was like common sense returning. She put her head out, looked left and right: carpeted corridor and dim, dead light. She was about to shut the door again when she sensed that something wasn’t as it should be. She put her head back out and looked left. Two rooms along, on the opposite wall of the corridor, the door was open – an oblong of darkness where polished wood should be. Beside the open door, sitting on the carpet against the wall, there was what looked like a toilet bag. Was that the room from which she had heard shouting earlier and had been too frightened to come out? The noise had been so violent, she wondered what could have happened.
She stepped out into the corridor and listened. No sound came from the darkened room. She tiptoed towards it on her bare feet. She stopped and craned round the door jamb.
She thought at first she really was seeing a ghost. The motionless figure of a woman sat with its back towards her. She was facing a window with open curtains, against which the moonlight sharpened her outline. Beyond her the sea was turgid.
‘Excuse me,’ Marion said.
The woman remained motionless.
‘Excuse me!’
The woman’s head turned slightly to the left but it was her only movement. She said nothing. Her head turned back towards the sea.
Marion walked into the room, feeling embarrassed to be in her pyjamas but unable simply to walk away. When she stood beside the woman, Marion paused, transfixed by her utter self-absorption.
She sat like a woman in the waiting-room of a railway station where no trains came any more. She seemed dressed to travel but unable to move. Her cashmere coat was buttoned. A small travelling-bag lay on the floor beside her. There were some objects on the table in front of her. The only one Marion identified clearly was a small coolbag. The woman was staring through the windows at the moonlight on the sea. She was as bleak an image as Marion could remember seeing. Marion followed the woman’s eyes out into the darkness. Diseased and deadening pallor on the waters and the land. It was as if, Marion thought, the night was painting her mood. The world had leprosy.
‘Are you all right?’
The woman turned almost towards Marion without confronting her directly. Her face was cadaverous in the moonlight. ‘I’m not sure,’ she said.
‘Can I help you?’
‘I wouldn’t think so.’
‘Can