Charlotte had seemed to sum up the seedy grandeur of the Sterlings. That February day she had been wearing an ankle-length black coat of corduroy so thick that her arms had looked twice as plump as her frail wrists. She'd unwound several lengths of a black scarf from around her head and let it flap from her shoulders as she'd stalked up to the counter. Her grey hair had been restrained by heavy combs above a long pinched face of tissue-paper skin. "Some spools of green thread, the most expensive,
if
you please," she'd told Mabel with regal politeness. "Are these all? In a stout bag, thank you. Please don't trouble," she'd added when Mabel had reached for her change, a few pence. She'd flung the scarf around her ears and had swept out, leaving Mabel too amused to be furious.
Some weeks later Charlotte had come back. "Have you replenished your stock? I should have made myself clearer. I shall need a regular supply of your finest green thread. Meanwhile, please show me your white."
"You must enjoy sewing."
"So it appears," Charlotte had responded curtly. This time, however, she had accepted her change, which was a start. As she had continued to visit the shop she'd unbent very gradually, letting slip a compliment about Mabel's dress one day, another time remarking that a shopkeeper such as Mabel must see all manner of people to talk to. Thus encouraged, Mabel had eventually asked "What are you sewing with all this thread?"
Charlotte had stared so hard at her that meeting her gaze had made Mabel's eyes sting. At last the old woman had said "When it's finished I'd like you to see."
Mabel shivered and went to the oven to pull out the trays of mince pies. She slid in the last tray and stood close to the oven, hugging herself. Translucent flames of frost were spreading imperceptibly up the window. She hurried upstairs to put on a heavier cardigan before sitting with her back to the kitchen window and the dripping tap. She wouldn't be driven out of her kitchen, but while she was remembering the Sterlings she preferred not to face their dark house and darker woods.
A little more than a year ago Charlotte had brought in her sewing, producing it from a worn black handbag large enough to contain the cash register. It had proved to be an embroidered message, god is good, in a heavy wooden frame. "It's for Ben, my grandson," Charlotte had announced with a kind of grim pride.
The message had been surrounded by elaborate patterns which looked as if Charlotte had been trying to fix the meaning of the words for ever. To Mabel the patterning had seemed obsessive almost to the point of compulsion, the symmetry somehow discomforting. "Look at all the care you've taken," she said. "You must think a lot of your grandson. Are you pleased with how he's growing up?"
As Charlotte had stared at her Mabel had thought she'd presumed too much — and then Charlotte had gripped the edge of the counter and leaned so close that Mabel had smelled medicine on her breath. "His mother is," the old woman had whispered, "but not her sister."
It was clear which of them she agreed with. Before Mabel could think what to ask next, Charlotte had shoved herself away from the counter, sucking in her breath so hard that her lips had turned white. A moment later the shop door had opened to admit both of the Sterling men, pale nostrils flaring as they thrust their sharp faces forwards almost doglike, white eyebrows raised in identical expressions of mild reproof. "We were wondering where you'd wandered off to, Mother," the younger man had said.
"Come along now, Charlotte. You're always saying you don't like the cold. Let's get you back to bed. You'll be losing your sewing if you start taking it out of the house, and it's been doing you so much good."
As each man took hold of one of her arms, Charlotte had given Mabel a look which stopped just short of an appeal. The memory made her shiver and glance towards the window as if her thoughts might be overheard. There was nothing to see except the frost climbing the glass, the cold of the night rendered visible. She turned away and moved closer to the oven.
Perhaps Charlotte had been as confused and senile as the men had made her seem. Perhaps her own condition had been what she was afraid of, and her public image her defence against it. Mabel had dismissed the notion that the men had been putting on a show for her, but she'd wondered what sort of Christmas the little boy would have. Whenever the black car passed her cottage she'd watched for him, sitting bright-eyed and alert beside the driver, and she couldn't help thinking he looked starved of an ordinary childhood, though mustn't children always regard their own childhood as the norm? She'd considered inviting the Sterlings to her house over Christmas, and once she'd started up the track, but had felt so cold in the shadow of the forest that she'd turned back. Later that day she had been shocked to see the two men and the little boy disappearing into the pathless forest when it was almost dark. She'd watched for them to reappear, but she must have missed them. Surely they couldn't have been in there until after midnight, when she had gone to bed.
Early in January Charlotte had returned to the shop. She'd looked withered, exhausted, barely capable of supporting the weight of her overcoat. She'd stood at the counter, flicking her fingers irritably at locks of grey hair which wouldn't be contained by her scarf, until Mabel had said "Did your grandson like his present?"
The old lady had gripped the counter as if she might fall. "It isn't finished," she'd said.
Presumably she'd meant her embroidery, but why should that have caused her voice to shake? Mabel never knew, because at that moment she'd seen Ben's mother hurrying across the square. She'd thought of warning Charlotte, and then it had been too late. The old lady had started nervously as Ben's mother opened the door. "There you are, Charlotte. Carl and his father were worried about you."
Her face had looked fattened by Christmas and dull with suppressing emotion, with doing her duty as she saw it, and Mabel had instinctively disliked her. "You know where I am if you need to talk," Mabel had wanted to tell the old lady — but mightn't that have brought her to Mabel's house as, perhaps, she grew more senile? In retrospect, too late, that seemed unlikely. Holding her head high, Charlotte had stalked out of the shop so abruptly that Ben's mother had had to trot to keep up with her. Mabel had never seen her to speak to again, but surely that was no reason for Mabel to feel guilty about the car crash.
Nobody knew for certain what had caused it, even if the only witness had seen the Sterlings arguing as their car had passed hers — even if the witness had thought she'd seen the people in the back seat, Ben's mother and grandfather, trying to calm down an old woman. Perhaps Charlotte had finally lost her temper at the way they treated her, but could that have been enough to cause the crash on a moorland road where you could see for miles? It must have been. Surety there was no need to wonder if Charlotte had deliberately caused the accident to put a stop to something she'd imagined or to save Ben from his family.
Mabel told herself that she had been reading her own anxiety about the little boy into Charlotte's behaviour, and huddled closer to the oven. Perhaps she wouldn't think about the Sterlings any more until she could discuss her thoughts with someone; just now they were making her feel vulnerable. Had she caught a chill? Though she would be disappointed if she had to forego midnight mass, she thought she might be well advised to take a glass of brandy up to bed once the last tray of pies was out of the oven. At least the tap had finally stopped dripping, but it would require some effort for her to wait for the pies if she kept on shivering like this. Could she have left the front door open? No, the cold was coming from the direction of the window, for her back felt like ice. The casement must have opened somehow. She staggered to her feet, her legs trembling, and waved her hands to try and clear away the sudden mist of her breath.
The window was closed tight. It was closed, even though an icicle was hanging from the tap. At first she didn't understand what else she was seeing. Even when she held her breath until her head swam, the window still looked pale and blurred. She flapped her hands at the air as best she could — they were beginning to feel stiff and unfamiliar — and then she realised that the pallor wasn't in the air, it was on the window itself. Ice was spreading across the entire window, so swiftly she could see the translucent tendrils growing.
She couldn't move. Her legs felt withered and unstrung, barely capable of supporting her. An intricate circular pattern of ice was spreading from the centre of the window as if a focus of intense cold was approaching the glass. It was like a mask, Mabel thought with a terrible clarity: a mask for a head that must be wider than she dared imagine, the head of a presence so cold that its advance was causing the ice to form — a presence, she knew suddenly, whose attention her thoughts had drawn to her. She sensed its hugeness in the dark outside her cottage. Please make it go away, please let her be preserved from seeing what it looked like behind its mask of ice. She vowed before God to stop thinking if that would make it go away ...
And then she had a thought which would have made her clench her fists if she had been able to move them. If her thinking of Ben Sterling had brought this out of the night to her, what might it want of him? She could feel the arctic cold settling over her like sleep made tangible, but she mustn't let go: someone had to keep the little boy away from whatever was waiting for him. Then the ice on the window spread onto the wall like marble coming elaborately to life, and she felt that happening inside her too. As she fell helplessly towards the stove, her thoughts were extinguished like a match.
THINGS OVERHEARD
"Understand me, when I talk of purity. I don't mean a little matter, but
my
purity — the purity I have in mind — is distinguished and aloof... metaphysical, of the stars ... of the big spaces ..."
David Lindsay,
Devil's Tor
NINE
The children were expecting London to be an adventure, and it proved to be one. Ellen was congratulating herself on having navigated the Volkswagen into the West End despite the lunch-time traffic when they were confronted by a sign which said Oxford Street was closed to private cars. Now Ellen saw why it was surrounded by so many one-way arrows on the map. The car tailgating Ben's blared its horn at him for braking, and a businessman crossing in front of him brandished two fingers as if he had sounded the horn. "That's a bad example," ten-year-old Margaret advised her brother.
"I expect he was wishing us success," Ben said. "V for victory. I don't mean to change the subject, but where do I go now?"
The map appeared to have turned into a mass of arrows which collided and dodged away like a diagram of turbulence. "Across and next right," Ellen said, since that seemed to be the only way to go.
The route took them past the British Museum. "That's where they have lots of old weapons, isn't it, Dad?" seven-year-old Johnny said. "Could we go and see them if there's time?"
"I don't suppose they'd have an old tank we could use to make our way to where we're going," Ben wondered, showing his teeth at a No Entry sign.
"Only if there's time," Johnny said rather plaintively. "We aren't going to be late, are we? Won't they publish your book if we're late?"
"I'm sure they will, sweetie," Ellen said, turning 'to smile at his thin pale eager face, almost a miniature of his father's except for his hair, which was black like hers. "Be a little quiet now until we get there."
Shaftesbury Avenue led them across Cambridge Circus, beyond which Ben raced the oncoming traffic into a wide street, beating a double-decker bus to the intersection so narrowly that Johnny cheered while Margaret screamed and Ellen held her breath. Traffic wardens and women wearing fishnet stockings prowled a labyrinth of streets made even narrower by illegally parked cars, some immobilised by wheel-clamps. Whenever a gap opened in the traffic there seemed to be a taxi poised to dart into it. Ben drummed the wheel as if he was about to fling up his hands, and then he bumped the car over the kerb into a oneway street. "A miracle. A space."
Most of the parking meters in the street had bags over their heads, but the one at the end was working. He steered the car into the space and jumped out, and was reaching in his pocket when he read the sign on the meter.
"How
much for ten minutes? At this rate we'll just about have time to walk to the end of the street and back. My curse on whoever's responsible. May their noses turn into sausages and be eaten by dogs, may their toes grow so long they have to tie them in knots to walk
Anxiety and mirth and dismay because she'd brought no money were chasing one another over Margaret's long delicate oval face. "What comes after noses and toes?"
"Don't ask, or something might be after yours," Ellen said, searching her own purse. "Oh dear, the milkman took all my change."
"Shall I ask that lady in the doorway if she can change your notes, Mummy?" Johnny suggested.
"I think she might misinterpret your intentions, Johnny," Ben said, squeezing Ellen's knee and winking at her as he climbed into the car. "Let's blunder onwards. I see now, this is like a kind of life-size board game where the object is to avoid Oxford Street. I only hope this isn't an illegal move."
He backed to the intersection and was veering left when Margaret said "What's the name of your and Mummy's publishers?"
"Any other time I'd enjoy repeating it. Ember, a subsidiary of Firebrand Books."
"We just saw it."..
"Across the road you just came out of," Johnny gabbled, and Margaret added, "Where a lady's jumping up and down and waving."
Ellen looked back. On the far side of the crossroads a young woman was pointing at their car and gesturing with her other hand as she tried to cross the intersection. "She's telling us to go left twice and come back," Ellen guessed.
"You don't think her idea of fun could be misdirecting strangers."
When they managed to return to the crossroads the young woman was still there. She ran to the car as it turned right. She was wearing a moss-green suit, green tights and dark green shoes, and struck Ellen as altogether pixie-like, even her smile which was disproportionately wide for her small triangular face. "I didn't think there could be many families with children cruising through Soho. If I'd known you were coming by car I'd have given you better directions."