But the door was retreating, moving faster than she could gain on it. She could feel Alastair's mother behind her, strolling easily to catch her, smiling gently again. Suddenly the door surged toward her; she could touch it now. But it was shrinking. The doorknob was enormous in her hand, yet the door was too small for her even if she stooped. It was no larger than the door of a small animal's cage. The door was edging open. Sunlight fell in, over her head. As she staggered into the street, turning to support herself against the door-frame, she saw that the woman hadn't moved from the stairway door. "Never mind," she called to Betty, smiling. "You'll see him soon."
Betty squeezed through the shrinking frame. The street dashed sunlight into her face; the frame pressed her shoulders down, toward Alastair. He lay on the pavement, his head twisted up to her over his drooping shoulder, his huge tongue reaching for her through a stiff grin. The frame thrust her down, thrust her face into his.
It wasn't broad daylight, it was only six o' clock. But as she lay blinking in bed, having fled awake, that did little to rid her of her dream. Her room felt deserted, it offered no defense against the memory. After a while she dressed and went out to the park two streets away.
The tea had been drugged. Perhaps she wasn't yet free of its effects; she felt a little unreal, gliding lightly through the gradually brightening streets. Never mind. Once the drug had worn off she would be free of Alastair and his mother.
Mist shortened the streets. It dulled the railings of the park, lay like a ghost of metal on the lake. The colors of the trees were faded, the perennial leaves were glazed; the most distant trees looked like arrested smoke. Betty felt vulnerable. Reality seemed to hold itself aloof, leaving her menaced by her imagination.
On a rise in the ground within the mist, a sapling moved. It was walking toward her: a slim dark form, swaying a little as it descended the path. It was tall and dim. It was coming leisurely toward her, like Alastair's mother.
When it stepped from the mist onto the clear path she saw it was a man. Her gasp of relief was so violent that the mist snagged her throat; she was coughing as he neared her. He halted while she spluttered silent, except for the occasional cough which she could make sound like an apologetic laugh. "Are you all right?" he said.
His voice was light, soft with concern; his long slim face smiled encouragement. "Yes, thank" (cough and smile) "you."
"Pardon my intrusion. I thought you looked worried."
His tone was friendly without familiarity; it offered reassurance. Did she look more worried than she realized she felt? "Just preoccupied," she said, thinking of an acceptable excuse. "I'm working on a novel." She always enjoyed saying so.
His eyes widened, brightening. "Do you write? What do you write about?"
"People. That's what interests me." She wrote about them well, according to the reviews of her first novel.
"Yes. People interest me too."
In what way? But if she asked, she would be interviewing. That was how she'd met Alastair; she had been searching for someone worth interviewing in a cellar disco, where underground lightning made everyone stagger jaggedly. He had watched her searching, had come over to her; he had seemed fascinating, at the time.
The man—perhaps twenty years older than her, about forty-five—" smiling at her. "What do you do?" she said neutrally.
"Oh—know about people, mainly."
She deduced he meant that he had no job. Some of the most interesting people were unemployed, she'd found. "I'm in Brichester to talk to people," she said. "For my new book."
"That must be interesting. I know some people who might be worth your talking to," he said. "Not the common kind."
Oh yes? But Alastair and his mother still seemed too close for her to feel quite safe in trusting this man. "Well, thank you," she said. "Perhaps I'll see you again. I must be going now."
She thought she glimpsed the sign of a twinge of rejection. He must be vulnerable too. Then he was smiling and raising his hand in farewell, and she was walking away, forcing herself to walk away.
At the gate she glanced back. He was standing as she'd left him, gazing after her. Nearer her, a movement caught her attention: between the trees, against the muted glitter of misty ripples on the lake—a dark figure watching her? There was nothing when she faced it: it must have been the effect of the light. The man waved briefly again as she left the park; he looked small and rather frail and lonely now, on the thin path. She found herself wishing she'd asked his name.
Brichester was disappointing in the wrong way.
She had shown it to be disappointing in her first novel, _A Year in the Country__. She'd shown its contemptuous openly reluctant pandering to tourists; the way decay and new estates were dissolving the town's identity; the frustrations of the young and the middle-aged, the young settling for violence or hallucinations while they yearned for London, the middle-aged extending their sexual repertoire in glum desperation. She hadn't called the town Brichester, but the local papers had recognized it: their reviews had been peevishly hostile. That had added to her sense of triumph, for most reviews had been enthusiastic.
All she'd written had been partly true; the rest of Brichester she'd imagined, for she had been living in Camside. Perhaps she had underrated her imagination. She had moved to Brichester to write her second book, a portrait of the town in all its moods and aspects, based on observation and interviews. But the reality proved to be less interesting than her version of it; it was full of clichés, of anticlimaxes. No wonder Alastair, with his sense of a secret to be revealed, had seemed interesting.
The more she saw, the more it dulled her. In particular the young people were worse than bored: they were boring. She spent the rest of the day after she'd left the park, and the following day, finding that out. Some trendy phrases she heard a dozen times; if she heard them once more she would scream.
She walked home through the evening. Unpleasantly, she felt less like an observer than an outsider. She knew nobody in the town. But she wasn't going back to Camside, to her father; that would be admitting defeat. She nodded to herself, pressing her lips together, trying to feel strong.
Above the roofs the sky was flat; its luminous unrelieved gray was almost white. Its emptiness was somehow disturbing, as though it were a mirror clear of any reflection. The trees that bowed over the pavement, the bricks of the houses, looked thin, brittle, unreal; their colors seemed feeble. All this fed her alienation. The only real thing she could find in her recent memory was the man in the park, and he was distant now. If only she'd talked to him. Dully preoccupied, she took a short cut through an alley behind two streets.
The walls paced by, half as tall again as she. Their tops were crowded with shards of glass, dull as ice. Old doors went by amid the brick, bolted tight, no doubt on rusty hinges. She made her way between double-parked bins, their lids tilted rakishly. The whitish sky glowed sullenly in everything. Someone was hurrying behind her.
He wouldn't be able to squeeze past. She could hear his quick footsteps approaching. She began to hurry too, so that she'd be out of the alley before he reached her, so they wouldn't have to squeeze between the bins; that was why she was hurrying. But why couldn't she look back? Wasn't it silly to hurry as if fleeing? The footsteps stopped, leaving abrupt silence at her back.
He had leapt; he was in the air now, coming down at her. The idea was absurd, but she turned hastily. The alley was deserted.
She stared along the blank walls. There was nowhere he could have turned. She would have heard if any of the doors had opened. Had he leapt onto a wall? She glimpsed a figure crouched above her, gazing down—except that he couldn't have leapt onto the glass. The dead light and the brittle world seemed unnaturally still. Suddenly panic rushed through her; she fled.