But tonight, letting herself sink didn’t seem to work. The thing in the chair, whoever he was—whatever — wouldn’t let go. She forced herself to go on looking at him. Neat mustache, reddish-brown with a few white hairs, nicotine-stained fingertips twirling his trilby, round and round, round and round, stains on the sweatband, shiny patches on his knees where the cloth had worn thin — oh, yes, he was down on his luck, this one, in spite of his airs and graces.
I see through you, she thought. And immediately, as in a dream, found she could do exactly that. He was still there, very much there, but reduced to an outline, like a child’s drawing. Where the solid mass of his face and body had been there was now only a string of rising bubbles, like you get in a pond when something’s rotting underneath. She couldn’t put her finger on the change, because she could still see him, only now there was a sense that his apparent solidity was a delusion, and the reality was this constant flux. And he was getting smaller; his feet no longer quite reached the floor. He was child-sized now, and still shrinking fast, but somehow this didn’t reduce the force of his presence. If anything it increased it. The more he shrank, the more he was reduced to his essence, the more powerful he became.
She wanted to cry out, call for help, but there was no help, not against this, because he was liquid. He could change shape endlessly, fit himself into anything, flow through every crack in every barrier. And flow he does, drenching her in slime.
Look away. She looks instead at her left arm, which is lying on top of the coverlet, but it doesn’t seem to belong to her anymore. She focuses on her hand, tries to wiggle the fingers, but they won’t move. It’s too heavy, too stiff, she can’t do anything with it. She feels a spurt of hostility towards it. Is it even hers? It doesn’t feel like hers. Is it his hand? Her whole body feels cold along that side and so heavy, so leaden, the bed must surely soon start to tilt. She won’t look at the chair. Her right eye can’t see anything anyway, but she closes the one eye that still obeys her. Spit drools from the corner of her mouth, she can’t wipe it away; she tries to wipe it away with her other hand. The sheets are briefly warm, then cold, oh God she’s wet the bed again, she won’t half get wrong for that. But she keeps her eye closed, she won’t look at the chair. She won’t look at the chair.
Voices now, in the ward behind the screens, feet come flapping; a light shines in her eye. Stroke, she hears, stroke, but makes no sense of it. Nobody’s stroked her, not for a long, long time. Oh, six strokes of the cane, yes, she remembers that, remembers running out of school the second the bell rang, along the beach and up the hill to the castle, its towers black against the sky as the sun sinks down behind it. Running across the courtyard, now, stones hard under her feet, flecks of foam drifting like blossom across the grass, her head, her ears, even the marrow in her bones filled with the roaring of the sea. Queen Margaret’s tower behind her, she stands on the edge of the cliff. Close, so close she’s blinded by the spray and the sea boiling and churning in the Egyncleugh beneath her feet. Oh, and it’s nothing now to step forward, to take another step, and then another, to walk on air, and see, in the last moment before the water closes over her head, high above her on the cliff, Dunstanburgh’s broken crown.
TWENTY-THREE
ELINOR’S DIARY
14 October 1940
I think. The trouble with my life at the moment is that every day’s the same so I end up losing track and forgetting what day it is.
I haven’t kept a diary for years and I’m in two minds about it now. I suppose, because I associate it with adolescence, all that endless self-absorption which I’m vain enough to think I’ve grown out of, though I’ve no doubt there’d be plenty of people to disagree with me. My entire family, for a start.
So why now? Because I’m lonely. No Paul. No Rachel either — the farmhouse is empty. Rachel’s gone to stay with Gabriella, who’s had her baby now — a little girl — and Tim’s staying at his club, an easy walking distance from the War Office. Rachel’s given me a key and told me to take anything I need from the kitchen garden — after all, as she says, it’ll only go to waste — she’s even told me to raid her wardrobe, though since she’s expanded over the years and I’ve contracted, I can’t think that’s going to be much use. Still, I’ll give it a go. One thing about all that sewing I used to do, I’m quite good at altering clothes.
I found this notebook — completely blank — sitting in the bottom-right-hand drawer of Mother’s desk, and I find myself wondering why she bought it, what she intended it for, because it’s not at all the kind of thing she’d buy. There are scrapbooks in the kitchen with recipes cut out of magazines and pasted in. They’re thick, those books, and they smell of paste, and her thumb- and fingerprints are all over them. Looking through them, I can spot her favorite recipes because those pages are more daubed and crusted than the rest. I can remember the tastes too. Oh, and the ingredients…They’re like little messages from another world. But this notebook? No, I’ve no idea what it was for — and evidently she didn’t know either, since it was never used. Another mystery, and not one I’m likely to solve now.
I keep tripping over her presence. Everything here is hers, hers, not mine. The dressing table in the back bedroom…She used to look into that mirror every evening when she was getting ready for dinner. When I was a child, I used to sit on her bed in our old house and watch, though I knew my presence irritated her. Lots of hair-brushing, dabs of scent, the merest dusting of face powder — it was all a great mystery to me, what grown-up ladies did, and I felt I could never be part of it. (Oh, and how right I was!)
The sofa. I sit here in the evenings staring at the fire (lit for company, not warmth — it’s still very mild) and if I close my eyes I can actually feel my legs, skinny, little-girl legs, sticking straight out over the edge. It’s like one of those trick photographs where a child appears giant-sized because the proportions of the room are abnormal — or rather the reverse, since here I feel dwarfed by giant furniture, though really it’s the same size it always was. Only I don’t belong with it anymore.
I wonder what Paul’s doing. Whether he’s on duty. I wonder who he’s with. I wonder if Rachel has these thoughts about Tim — well, yes, of course she does, though in her case I’m pretty sure she’s right to be suspicious. I wonder if she minds.
Every time Paul visits, he brings me something, something he’s retrieved from the house. He says the house is stable, that there’s no risk, though I’m not sure I believe him. If it was stable we’d be allowed back in. I wish these little parcels didn’t feel so much like peace offerings. Last Friday, he brought two big portfolios of drawings, which had somehow survived, wedged in between the kitchen dresser and the wall, though I haven’t had the heart to look at them yet. Can’t open the portfolios. Can’t paint. Can’t do anything.