The Long Shadow (14 page)

B
Y THE TIME
Dot and Herbert arrived home, well after midnight, the moments of high drama were over. Cynthia, knocked unconscious by two of Edith’s blue sleeping-pills on top of several of her own pale-green tranquillisers—not to mention the brandy—lay now like the dead. Darling Desmond’s putative attitude to the situation (surely one not quite up his street?) had been gone through exhaustively, and the other-worldly revelations he came up with (that what must be must be, and that these things are sent to try us) had been given due weight. Imogen’s thoughts were now revolving round more practical possibilities: like who had been forging Ivor’s handwriting, and why?

Because forgery, of course, must be the explanation.

She was ashamed, now, of having screamed. For one thing, it put her into a category wherein Edith’s ministrations became unavoidable: and for another, she hated the feeling of having lost her head and made a fool of herself.

After the first, unreasoning panic was over, she’d gone back to the study, and had examined the drawer carefully, looking for clues. The first thing she’d noticed was that the mysterious Minoan manuscript, whose scattered pages she’d gathered together
yesterday
into a loose pile and laid on the desk, was now neatly sorted into chapters, each clipped together with a paper-clip, and the whole secured by an elastic band. There was more of it than she’d realised at first, it made quite a solid little pile of paper lying there in the drawer; but it still wasn’t of book length—her experienced eye told her this at once.

Five chapters, that was all. Probably about a third of what had been originally intended. Curious to assess the point at which the young, long-ago Ivor had given up, she began leafing through the
last few pages—and straight away got another shock, almost as great as the shock of finding the warning notice.

Since yesterday morning, alterations had been made. With a modern, blue-black biro, words had been crossed out, corrections added—intelligent corrections, so far as Imogen could judge:

“Around 1700
B.C
.” had been crossed out, and “Between 1550
B.C
. and 1400
B.C
.” written-in over the top, the new, fresh ink standing out like dark silk against the yellowing pages. Her heart beating strangely, she turned the next page, and the next, until she came to the last one of all.

She stared. She could not believe it.

Someone
was
going
on
with
the
book.
Since this morning, two new paragraphs had been added. Her eyes scanned incredulously the bold, familiar writing.

It seemed to be the resumption of some earlier discussion of the Cretan scripts and their decipherment; and it started off, so far as Imogen could judge, in a perfectly coherent and scholarly way. After a few sample lines of the curious, angular script (which by now was becoming almost familiar to Imogen), the text continued:

By now, Imogen’s hand was shaking so much that she could scarcely hold the page.

A joke, she kept saying to herself. A cruel, ridiculous joke. Don’t look for sense in it, don’t keep reading it over and over, there won’t
be
any sense, why should there be? It’s only a joke, a stupid, horrible joke.

But perpetrated by whom?

Robin? Teri? These were the names that sprang naturally to mind when something outrageous was afoot; but this time it wouldn’t do. Whoever it was who had sunk to this level of
tasteless
spite had gone to immense trouble over it—weeks and months of gruelling practice must have gone into the achieving of so brilliant and accomplished a forgery. It was impossible to suppose that either Robin or Teri were capable of this sort of application—Robin, who got bored with everything within minutes, or Teri, who didn’t even know the word “blackmail”.

Whoever had forged the writing—and indeed the style—so perfectly was someone of very different calibre.

It was the ease of the thing that was so amazing. Imogen was no graphologist, but common-sense told her that deliberately forged writing, even if superbly executed, would surely bear traces of artificiality, of laboured, over-meticulous penmanship.

She bent closer to the page, holding it once more under the lamp.

Not a sign, not a suspicion, of the kind of awkwardness she was looking for. The writing ran boldly, effortlessly—sometimes even carelessly—across the page, as though the writer, whoever he was, had practised and perfected the imitation for so long that it came to him as naturally as breathing.

What other possibilities were there? Was she, perhaps, in her over-wrought state, imagining a greater degree of resemblance than was really there?

Sitting down at the desk, Imogen spread the papers before her, and set herself, quite systematically, to search for flaws in the imitation: laying the new paragraphs alongside assorted old ones,
and comparing them letter by letter, and, wherever possible, word by word.

The two sets of writing were identical.

What in the world was going on? Was there someone who, for some unimaginable motive, was trying to make her believe, in the teeth of all the known and incontrovertible facts, that her husband was still alive? Or was it some mad spiritualist, trying to
convince
her that Ivor’s spirit still hovered around its old haunts, poking its supernatural nose into things, interfering with perfectly sensible earthly arrangements, and generally keeping its loved ones on their toes?

Just like Darling Desmond. And hot on the heels of this thought came another, unheralded and unbidden: Ivor would have loved it to be like that. He’d have loved to be a ghost, to amaze and startle, as only a ghost can; to appear and disappear at will, entirely at his own other-worldly convenience; to retain, though dead, a finger in every pie, a say in every family decision, and at the same time to enjoy his four-dimensional option of disappearing in a puff of smoke whenever anything became troublesome.

“One foot in the grave and the other in the rat-race”—that’s how he’d have described it, and he would have exploited it for all it was worth, getting the best out of both worlds and then
vanishing
with a gleeful rattle of chains just before the trouble started.

Soon, he would be famous. “Dead Professor Walks Again” would be the headline; and there would be meetings of the Psychical Research Society to discuss his authenticity.

The Barnicott Ghost: it would be a household word, in all the local guide-books, a tourist attraction. Sooner or later a
teenage
blonde would get mixed up in the thing, and her picture would be in all the Sunday papers alongside his. A book might even be written about him.

And then television, of course. Did ghosts ever appear on television?—Ivor’s ghost would. She could just hear his mellow,
disembodied voice putting the interviewer right on some bit of supernatural know-how….

For a moment, she fancied she really
could
just hear it: “Imogen, for God’s sake, why can’t you…?” but of course it was her imagination.

*

From now on, she must expect to imagine this sort of thing; for, of course, the affair was going to escalate. Whether it was fraud or spirit-messages, they weren’t going to leave it at this.

Come to think of it, it had escalated already—had, in fact, been escalating all the time. “You’ve got a poltergeist,” Cynthia had declared, and from that moment on the sequence of events had been exactly what one might have expected if her hypothesis had been correct. Objects mysteriously out of place; minor, mischievous damage; and invariably one or other of the children involved. In poltergeist phenomena there was always a child involved—so Imogen had read; and no doubt the perpetrator of the trick had read up the subject likewise.

There had already been one Manifestation—the face floating above Vernon’s bed. Soon, there would be others.

Thank God it was only a trick.

Imogen felt a pang of guilt at this so summarily depriving Ivor of his after-life and all its attendant fun and games; especially as he had worked so hard to attain it.

Well, he must have done. She pictured how it must have been for his bewildered, recalcitrant spirit during these past four months. Fluttering and feeble it would have been at first, from the great shock of death—and no doubt looking vainly around for her, Imogen, to do something about it.

And she had done nothing. Well, what
could
she have done?

*

“Good God! Are you asleep, or something?”

Dot’s voice, fresh and strident from her evening’s outing, burst across Imogen’s consciousness, driving the disjointed quotation (from somewhere or other in Homer, wasn’t it?) right out of her mind. She blinked at Dot stupidly; then straightened up, realising that she had been slumped forward over the desk, more than half asleep, her elbows among the papers.

“What
are
you doing?” continued Dot; and then, without waiting for an answer, she launched into the story of her own evening.

It had been an exciting one, by hers and Herbert’s standards. They had danced as well as dined; they had seen a drug-addict leaning against some railings; and they had stood up (or rather Dot had stood Herbert up) to the taxi-driver who’d tried to charge them double because it was after midnight.

He’d succeeded, actually; but (to judge by her own account) she’d got in a lot of satisfying ripostes first, and so victory, of a sort, had been enjoyed by all. Oh, and they’d seen someone walking down the Parade carrying a nursery fire-guard. At
this
time of night! Whoever would be wanting to carry a …

It seemed a shame, really, to break in on such blissful
reminiscences,
but it had to be done. It was just possible that Dot might be able to shed some light on the mysterious happenings of this evening; and there was, in any case, the furtive selling of the house in Twickenham to be explained. While Imogen was debating in her mind which of these two uncomfortable topics to raise first, the decision was summarily taken out of her hands. Dot broke off in mid-sentence and pointed like a gun-dog:

“
What
’
s
that
cat
doing
here
?”
she demanded: and for the first time since she’d entered the house, Imogen recollected the
existence
of Minos. How he’d got out of his basket (or got someone to get him out) she would never know—cats are like that—but anyway, here he was now, curled up fast asleep on the seat of Ivor’s big leather chair.

“Well—” she was beginning apologetically, and then, suddenly,
What the hell? she thought, and moved over to the attack. After all, the selling of a house surely demands more explanations than the fetching of a cat?

*

Dot was almost aggressively off-hand. It was a good time to sell, she pointed out, the agent had said so. He had, apparently,
complimented
her, Dot, on the singular goodness of the time, and also on her foresight in having installed central heating in spite of the fact that Herbert enjoyed sawing up logs on Saturday
afternoons
. The exercise was good for him, he’d pleaded; and, “What about your fibrositis?” she’d countered, quick as a flash. And now, hey presto, she’d been proved right, to the tune of an extra £750 on the selling price, and if that didn’t cure Herbert’s fibrositis, nothing would.

And yes, well, she was sorry she hadn’t told Imogen about all these plans, but she hadn’t wanted to worry her (people never do want to worry you about issues over which you might oppose them, Imogen reflected); and besides, the house hadn’t been sold yet, had it, so there wasn’t, actually, anything to tell. Where were they moving to? Well, Dot had never believed in crossing bridges until she came to them; and all Imogen’s efforts to convince her that she
had
come to this one, right here in her stepmother’s home, evoked only the blank, unhearing look with which Dot habitually countered arguments which fell outside her chosen area of conflict.

Imogen had earlier decided not to tell Dot about the mysterious up-heaving of the dust-sheet until tomorrow, not wanting to upset her last thing at night; but now she changed her mind, and decided that Dot could do with all the upsetting she could get. Determined to wipe that vacant, impervious look off her
stepdaughter’s
face if it was the last thing she did, Imogen launched straight into her story, making it as melodramatic and unnerving as she knew how. So successful was she that Herbert gave a little “Oh!” of dismay and scurried from the room, while Edith—who was still hanging around in hopes of further morsels of disaster—gasped,
and dabbed at her eyes with her handkerchief. Though how such a narrative could have reminded her in any way of Darling Desmond, it was hard to imagine.

Only Dot seemed unperturbed.