The Ghost Writer (24 page)

For the first few weeks of their engagement, Harry had seemed perfectly content. A long spell of fine weather had enabled them to spend a great deal of time out of doors, including several paradisal hours on the riverbank. But even then, the intervening days had passed very slowly indeed. With Beatrice in town all week, Cordelia was effectively tied to Ashbourn, partly for reasons of economy, and partly because Aunt Una, after visiting a London heart specialist, had been ordered to avoid exertion, and rest for several hours every day. And since the house had no telephone, and Harry was, as he cheerfully conceded, hopeless at letters, she would usually have heard nothing from him since the last farewell.

He was also constitutionally incapable of catching a specified train, being always liable to slip into the Museum, or a saleroom, "just for five minutes" and emerge an hour and a half later. And then at Hurst Green he might be drawn into conversation with the stationmaster, or someone he met in the village street, and lose track of yet more time before he came into view of the house, waving as enthusiastically as ever. So she had got into the habit of settling herself with a book in the upstairs window at the earliest possible time, though she seldom did much reading. Her imagination was too active, her emotions too keen; and all too often, especially once the expected hour had come and gone, morbid anxieties would begin to flit about her mind.
The train has been delayed. He has accepted another invitation and forgotten to tell me. He has simply forgotten. He no longer loves me. He has met someone else. There has been an accident The train has crashed. He is injured ... he is dead. I shall never see him again
... all in the most vivid detail. It was like waving away midges at twilight: as fast as you drove one off, another would dart in and stab, on and on interminably, until they were banished by the familiar wave and greeting from the lane below.

For those few perfect weeks, that first embrace had seemed to her the purest essence of joy: she would twine herself around him, only wishing she could hold him close enough to annihilate all distinction between them. Until—she could not say exactly when; the more she brooded upon where the first shadow had fallen, the further back it seemed to stretch—she had become aware that his passion no longer matched her own. She had tried persuading herself that he was merely embarrassed by excessive displays of ardour in public, but even since she had learned to be more restrained, he was likely to say "Here, steady on, old thing", and glance nervously up at the windows. And then he had begun to say such things in private. Her conviction that she must be perfectly, blissfully happy had carried her along, as if she had set out for a walk on a cloudless day, too absorbed to notice the fine, tell-tale streaks of vapour overhead, the gradual weakening of the light, until quite suddenly she had looked up, and shivered, and realised that she had been cold for a long time.

She shivered in fact, though there was nothing chill about the present evening. The house was completely silent. Aunt Una would be lying down in her room; Uncle Theodore was no doubt reading in his study; Beatrice had not yet returned from town. Her lessons at Miss Harringay's were normally over by two o'clock each Friday, and she was supposed to come straight home. But perhaps Harry had got in touch, and suggested she travel down with him, though this had never happened before. At Uncle Theodore's insistence, Beatrice had always taken the first train up each Monday morning, rather than returning with Harry on the Sunday night. Theodore had told Beatrice, when she. began at Miss Harringay's, that he wanted her to impose as little as possible upon her friends in Bayswater; but Cordelia suspected that he had understood how she would have felt to see Beatrice and Harry setting off together, and was grateful to him. She had not realised until too late just how much she was giving up for Beatrice's sake. The four happy years she had spent at Ashbourn since leaving school now seemed to have vanished in a sort of contented sleep; she too wanted to be out preparing to earn her living, as she meant to do when they were married; and in London she could have seen Harry every day.

Beatrice, to do her justice, had not once suggested that Harry should escort her. Her manner towards him had grown still more constrained, but that was capable of more than one interpretation. Cordelia had not been able to stop herself asking Harry, every so often, whether he had seen anything of Beatrice in town; he always assured her he had not; but on the other hand, he had never asked whether she thought he ought to, which suggested he knew better than to ask. And once she had begun to doubt the strength of his feeling, her anxieties had multiplied and swarmed. Until, after tossing and turning for hours on the previous Saturday night, she decided to go down to the kitchen and make herself some cocoa (and perhaps, if she felt bold enough, look in at Harry while he slept). As she approached the room in which they had stored the remainder of Henry St Clair's belongings, she saw light shining from beneath the door.

Unlike the studio, which had its own special lock, this door opened to the same key as all the other rooms in the corridor. Had somebody left the light on? But why? She had not entered the room for many weeks; not since they had put away "The Drowned Man" and turned the key on it. She listened, holding her breath. No sound came from within, but it seemed to her that there was a very faint, rhythmic pulsation in the pool of light around her feet. Which would be worse: to look and see, or lie awake with her imagination running wild? She took hold of the handle and softly opened the door.

Harry—still fully dressed, though it was two in the morning—stood facing her over the lectern, swaying slowly back and forth. She had last seen it in the far corner, draped in a cloth. Now it stood in the centre of the floor, directly beneath the light. If he had glanced up, their eyes would have met, but his entire attention remained fixed upon the lectern. She could see the glitter of his shadowed eyes, and it seemed to her that he was very faintly smiling. She waited, willing him to look at her, until the suspense became unbearable.

"Dearest?"

The rhythm of his breathing faltered like that of a sleeper on the verge of waking, but his concentration did not waver. How long had he been creeping in here at night? Dust was already thick upon the floor, and on the furniture, and yet the lectern, what she could see of it, looked spotless.

She took another step into the room, her hand still on the doorknob. But the hem of her dressing-gown caught on an empty frame and brought it clattering to the floor.

His head jerked up. For a dreadful moment, he glared as if he had come face to face with his worst enemy; he seemed to be gathering himself to spring. Slowly, recognition returned; now, he looked like her imagination of a burglar caught red-handed. He lowered his eyes, closed the panel, and slunk out from behind the lectern.

"I ... I must have been sleep-walking," he muttered.

"Please don't lie to me. If you must look at it, at least trust me enough to tell me so."

"I didn't want you to know;"

"To know
what
?" she cried.

But his reply was cut off by the sound of footsteps padding towards the room. It was Beatrice, a green dressing-gown thrown over her nightdress.

"What's the matter?" she asked.

"Nothing," replied Cordelia. "Harry—thought he heard a burglar, that's all. I'm sorry we woke you."

"Yes," said Harry. 'Er—false alarm. Sorry. Anyway, good-night both." He kissed her hastily, and made for the stairs.

Cordelia lay awake until dawn, then overslept, and came down very late with a headache. A contrite Harry immediate proposed a walk in Hurst Wood—something he had not done for weeks—and they set off towards the riverbank. He hadn't exactly been lying about the sleep-walking, he explained as they walked along; he had fallen asleep in the armchair in his room, and dreamed that he was looking at "The Drowned Man", and in the dream he had seen, at last, what the face had been trying to tell him. Then he woke, still with the sensation of understanding, but the substance had gone. And so he had taken his key and gone upstairs, hoping to recapture it.

"And did you?" she asked, longing to believe him, but not quite convinced.

"No ... I thought ... but no. I lose myself in it, and then—then it goes, like that dream, when something calls me back."

"When I knocked over the frame, you looked as if you hated me." Her voice quivered as she spoke.

"I am so sorry ... I was not myself"

"Then who were you?"

He glanced at her uneasily. "I meant, I didn't know what I was doing."

She stopped in the middle of the path, put her hands on his shoulders, and turned him towards her.

"Harry, look at me. There's no burden, nothing I wouldn't happily bear for your sake. But I can't marry you if you won't trust me,"

He threw his arms around her and launched into a stream of apologies. He had learned his lesson; they would lock "The Drowned Man" away in a stout box and she could keep the only key of it, if she liked, but in any case he would never, never look at it again; he loved her, adored her, could never live without her ... all very gratifying, but at the end of it she was no closer to understanding the cause of his strange compulsion. And when they reached the riverbank, she found herself drawing back from his kisses, and searching his face for the absolute assurance his words had somehow failed to provide, while her headache grew worse and worse until she was compelled to return to the house. Neither aspirin nor rest would subdue the pounding in her head, and by the time she came down again he was gone, leaving only a note to say that he had not wanted to disturb her.

The following afternoon, Cordelia went up to the storeroom and carried "The Drowned Man" and its lectern back to its former place in the studio. If he could not resist it openly ... she did not know what would follow, only that she could not bear the idea of his creeping back to it in the night; and besides, her uncle held the only other key to the studio.

The day was cool and bright; a light breeze came through the open window, causing one of the pictures hanging on the opposite wall to sway and tap very lightly against the panelling. She finished sweeping the floor, then turned the easel so that it faced the light, sat down on the bed, and tried to lose herself in the portrait. Glowing, vibrant, perfectly composed, Imogen de Vere regarded her with intimate understanding. It struck Cordelia, not for the first time, that an observer might easily assume that the portrait was to her what "The Drowned Man" was to Harry. She had spent another restless night, and much of the day, brooding upon the possible causes of its power over him. Was it related, somehow, to his unflagging determination to locate and befriend Henry St Clair? Harry had yet to uncover a single scrap of evidence beyond what was stored in these two rooms, but his conviction that St Clair was alive and, as it were, waiting for Harry to knock on his door, remained unshaken.

It would have been better if they had left everything alone; this had all sprung from her idea of restoring the studio. She had felt so certain that the evil had been banished ... but then she did not—did she?—truly believe in the power of curses. Not on a sunny afternoon like this, and besides, it made no sense. De Vere had not painted "The Drowned Man"; St Clair had. And even if you believed in—the sort of thing that came to you, lying awake in the dark, recalling, all too vividly, the story of de Vere's last days—there was nothing else in the room that could possibly...

Except the polished wooden cube in the corner at the foot of the bed.

It was much heavier than she remembered—of course, Harry had helped her lift it—and though there was no discernible rustling this time, she thought that something moved or shifted very slightly inside it as she set it down on the bed. You could not tell which way up it was supposed to go, if there was a right way: the six side panels looked exactly the same. Each had been overlaid with a plain strip of polished wood—cedar or mahogany, she thought—around the outside, so that the actual panel was recessed, with an elaborately carved rosette, about the size of a florin, in the centre. As she turned the box from side to side, she found herself coming back to one particular rosette, until it occurred to her to count the carved petals. All of the others had twelve petals; this one had thirteen. Gingerly, she tried pressing, and then twisting the rosette, and felt it turn very slightly. What might it be? Surely nothing could still be alive in there? A vision of huge, veinous eggs had her leaping away from the bed, almost knocking over the easel. Should she call her uncle? He would tell her, quite rightly, to leave it alone. Yes: put it back in the corner, or better still, lock it away in the room next door. But already those eggs had begun to hatch in her imagination. What if it sprang open, like a jack-in-the-box, as soon as she picked it up? Far better to leave it for Harry to move next Saturday; but that would mean five days of picturing monstrous spiders swarming about the studio, for the lid might fly up as soon as she locked the door...

An altercation of blackbirds in a nearby oak subdued these fearful visions sufficiently for her to seize the broom. Without giving herself time to think, she twisted the rosette with, her other hand as far as it would go and sprang away again.

A dark line had appeared along the edge of the panel. She waited, straining to listen over the thudding of her heart, but nothing more happened. Holding the broom at arms length, she tried to work the bristles into the crack, but her hand trembled so violently that she dislodged the panel completely, and it slid down onto the bed.

Nothing came out. Edging closer, she saw that the top of the box was tightly packed with crumpled-up sheets of newspaper. She began to dislodge these with the broom, which compelled her to move closer to the box as she worked down through the layers of packing until she began to uncover something green—a hard, rounded object about the size of ... a turkeys egg ... wrapped in a fine emerald green velvet cloth ... no, an emerald green
gown,
she could see from the stitching ... and the thing inside couldn't be an egg, because it had a dome-like protuberance at one end, with some sort of spike, perhaps, beyond that, and when she tapped it very lightly with the broom handle she could hear a muffled ringing sound. Gently, she prised up the bundle so that it lay on top of the packing. Whatever was inside could not weigh very much. She tapped with her fingers; too hard to be an egg. It felt like glass.