She sighed. "Can't either of you leave me alone?"
Fowler felt his mouth pull his hot face taut. He stared about wildly, but there wasn't a book to be grabbed, nothing to hide him. Suzanne sighed again, more gently. "I'm sorry, Fowler. That was unfair of me. You aren't like him. Let's give it time, shall we?"
Did she mean until he was older? He was already old enough, he thought, but one way to prove it was not to persist. "Thanks. That'd be great," he said, and then he froze. "No she didn't," he said.
"I missed that. What did you say?"
"Nothing, forget it," he stammered, just as the voice repeated, "She led him on."
"Don't be stupid," Fowler muttered, surely too quietly for Suzanne to hear—but she could see that he was speaking. She pulled the hem of her skirt down and blinked at him. "Are you all right, Fowler?"
"Of course I am," he said, with a harshness he meant only for the voice.
"She wanted him to dirty her. See now, she's trying to make you look at her down there by pretending that she doesn't want you to. Don't you know where those legs lead? She's an occasion of sin, Fowler. Turn your eyes away."
"Shut up," Fowler said against his knuckles that were bruising his gums. "See, I'm not looking. Shut up now. Leave me alone."
"I will if you want me to," Suzanne said, not quite evenly. "Perhaps I better had."
He saw her stand up and remember that they were locked in. "You can stay here," he babbled. "I want to get something to read."
He floundered into the library and seized a book from the shelf nearest the counter, something about the subconscious. He flung himself onto a chair behind the counter. "Far enough?" he said through his teeth.
The absence of a response was only a threat of more if he ventured back toward the staffroom, he knew. He sat in the empty library, occasionally shivering from head to foot, until Ben unlocked the outer door. Ben smirked at him and then strode pompously into the staffroom, saying loudly, "I hope there's been no misbehavior I should know about." Suzanne fled into the library without replying, and at once the voice said, "Don't look at her."
After that the day grew steadily more unbearable. Whenever Fowler had to stand at the counter with Suzanne, the voice started to harangue him until he could move away. "Occasion of sin, occasion of sin. Don't touch her, you don't know where she's been. Keep back or she'll be smearing you with her dugs, she'll get her smell on you ..." As the time for the afternoon breaks approached, the voice grew positively deranged, piling up images more obscene than the passage Ben had tried to read aloud, and fell silent only when Suzanne insisted on taking her break by herself.
Fowler spent his break in one of the easy chairs, his eyes closed, his head aching like a rotten tooth. When he made himself go back to the counter the voice recommenced at once: "There she is, little harlot, filth on legs ..." Somehow he managed to help serve the growing queues of readers, hating himself for feeling relieved when Ben finished his break and kept sidling between him and Suzanne. At last it was closing time, and he groped his way to the staffroom for his coat and walked more or less straight to the door where Ben was waiting, having already let Suzanne flee them both. "I hope you'll be fitter for work on Monday," Ben warned him.
He was stepping out of the shade of the shopping precinct into the humid afternoon when the voice came back. Now it seemed to be trying to soothe him, trying until he thought he might scream. "That's right, you go home where you're safe. Go home where you're loved and looked after. There's only one woman for you . . ." It sounded more out of control than ever, less and less able to disguise its feelings and itself.
The football game had emptied the streets. When he reached his bunch of houses, he heard his mother praying for him, a sound so ritualized that he knew the prayers couldn't occupy the whole of her mind. He crept along the terrace, sneaking his key out of his pocket, and inched the front door open.
Silence gathered around him as he eased the door shut behind him. Both the praying and the voice that had urged him home had stopped. Did that mean his mother had heard him? Apparently not, for another prayer began at once: his mother had only paused after an amen. He tiptoed upstairs, growing less sure at every step what he meant to do. How could he suspect her, his own mother, of even thinking what he'd heard? But if it hadn't been her, must it have been himself? He dodged past her bedroom door and peered around the edge.
She was lying on the drab counterpane in the reluctant light from the speckled window, her hair covering the pillow like a rusty stain, her hands clasped on her chest. Except for the movement of her lips, she might have been asleep or worse. She was troubling her rest by praying for him, and his idea of gratitude was to imagine outrageous things about her. He put one hand on the wall to ease himself out of sight and make his way back to the street before she noticed him. He was still gazing at her, his head pounding with guilt, when the voice said, "Why, yes. There I am."
He couldn't mistake its meaning, nor its certainty. He gasped, and shrank back out of sight, praying that his mother hadn't heard him. But her feet thumped the floorboards, and she rushed to the door and threw it open so hard it cracked the wall. "Who's there?" she screamed.
Before Fowler could speak or move, she ran to the top of the stairs. She realized someone was behind her, and swung around, sucking in a breath that rattled in her throat. Just as she saw him, her face lost all color and collapsed inwards, her eyes rolled up. As he lunged to catch hold of her, she fell backwards down the stairs and struck the hall floor with a lifeless thud.
Fowler leapt, sobbing, down to her. He clutched her hands, rubbed her sagging cheeks, made himself press one palm against her breast. Nothing moved except silvery motes of dust in the air. He dug his fingers into her shoulders and began to shake her, until he saw how her head lolled. He was drawing a breath to cry out helplessly when a voice murmured, "Thank you."
Fowler bent to his mother's face and scrutinized her lips. He had recognized her voice, and yet they weren't moving. He was staring so hard at them that his eyes stung, trying to will them to stir, when the voice said, "Don't look for me there. You've set me free."
He staggered to his feet, twisting about like an animal, almost tripping over his mother's corpse. The voice was above him, or behind him, or on his shoulder, or in front of him. "Just let me get my bearings," it said, "and then I'll tell you what to say to people."
Fowler began to retreat up the stairs, unable to think how else to escape, unable to step over the body that blocked the foot of the stairs. He thought of going to the top and flinging himself down as injuriously as he could. "Silly boy," the voice said. "Don't you know I'd never let you do that? You mustn't blame yourself for what happened, and you mustn't think you were tricked either. I didn't realize it was me until after you did."
Fowler halted halfway up the staircase, staring through the murky light at the husk of his mother. He felt as incapable of movement himself. "That's right, you get your breath back," the voice said, and then it grew wheedling with just a hint of imperiousness. "Let's see you smile like you used to. I'm going to look after you properly from now on, the way I used to wish I could. You'll always be my baby. Just think, you've made it so we'll always be together. Surely that's worth a smile."
The Old School (1989)
The house was locked. Dean strolled around the outside for a quarter of an hour, gazing through the tall windows at displays of roped-off rooms, and then he climbed the wide steps to the balcony. A lawn broader than his eyesight offered shrubberies and formal gardens and tree-lined walks. At the edge of the lawn, almost half a mile away, woods blotted out every vestige of the further world.