Last Act of All (28 page)

‘
Your pa went off to Austria first thing. You’ll need to be good now, because there’ll be a lot to do, people coming for the funeral, I don’t doubt.’

She
did not mention the day before. The child could not.

The
night before Gervase’s funeral, Giles sat at his desk with his papers before him, but gazing over them unseeing to the framed snapshots of his son, his hair tousled from running, and his wife, her mouth in its sweet curve, her blonde curly hair springing back strongly from the smooth brow. The picture of his daughter as a baby he did not even see.

As
he looked bleakly at Melody’s smiling face, his hand dropped from the side of his chair and rested, for an incredulous moment, on her soft curls. He came to himself with a cry, and looked down on a smaller head, then into the pleading upturned face of his daughter.

It
was too much; he could not bear it.

‘
Get out!’ he said with barely suppressed violence. ‘Get out, and for God’s sake never do that again.’

And
the child fled.

She
was only nine years old, but she had learned already the futility of tears. She had learned that nothing was too bad to happen, and that she could trust no one. She had learned, too early, the frightful truth that we are all of us, in the end, alone.

She
had not learned yet that life went on, and they could patch you up so effectively that no one would realize that inside, somewhere, you had been warped and twisted to destruction.

She
seemed entirely calm by the time she reached her room. She went over to the desk and picked up, once more, the blue suede diary. Sitting in her chair she read, quite slowly, what she had written, and took up the pen again to add another half page. Then she picked up a crayon, and solemnly, meticulously, coloured every remaining page black until she reached the end of the book.

***

Time passed and agony faded, as it does. She worked hard at creating the shell to cover her scars, pretty and smooth and fragile as a robin’s egg. She grew up, she found friends, and she had a step-mother – another doctor – who was kindly, if detached. She married young.

She
left Missy behind, long-forgotten in the mists of a childhood she never chose to recall. But Missy did not go away. Missy waited, silent in the shadowy corners of her mind, for the crack made by some blow of fate through which she could emerge, full-fledged, in a form older, stronger, and more evil still.