The Uncanny, page 11
“Yes, they came to me as in a dream,” he said. “I had just called in for my messages, when suddenly I heard a strangled muttering followed by a curse with two old geezers talking football in the background. A mental image formed—I saw before me an idiosyncratic Luddite incompetently attempting to communicate with my answering machine from a local pub. I thought it might be you.”
“Ah.”
“Time!” called the barman.
Harper tilted her Guinness high, polished off the bottom foam. Set the glass down decisively. “Time,” she said. Bernard nodded. They both stood.
The young man fetched her cape from the stand in the corner, helped her shrug into it. He smoothed it down her back as she buttoned the front. Harper then slipped her pipe in her satchel and pulled the strap over her shoulder. Clapped her Borsalino onto her head; adjusted her glasses. Bernard retrieved her stick from the chimney corner and handed it to her. Completely recovered now, she patted his high cheek.
“Thank you for coming, lad. I should not have liked to’ve been bundled off like washing.”
He squeezed her hand. “We’ll go as we lived, darling—flailing about.”
“Ha-ha.”
She lifted the dragon’s head to the barman. Walked with Bernard to the double doors. They both paused there, peering through the etching of the crane on the glass. The thug was no longer at his post on the corner. No one else was visible either. The street was empty. It seemed empty, anyway.
“Well,” said Bernard under his breath. “It’s only thirty steps home.”
But they got no more than ten.
She pushed her door open. He shouldered through his. They stepped out onto the corner, under a streetlight. Began to cross the street. Bernard stayed close to Harper’s left shoulder. They looked to either side of them. Bernard glanced behind. No one was visible in any direction.
They went across the road diagonally, moving from the streetlight towards their own portico. About midway, they stepped out of the streetlight’s glory, into darkness.
And the scarred man came at them as if from nowhere.
He approached them swiftly, without breaking stride. He pointed to his wrist. He smiled, but his scar distorted it into a toothy smirk.
“Have you got the time, darling?” he said.
But he never stopped coming at them, charging at them. And there were other footsteps now, running footsteps, all around them, closing in.
“The time,” Harper growled, “is not yet.” Her stick was in her left hand, her right was pulling the dragon, pulling the sword’s blade free of its sheath. She brought the sharp steel arcing over her head, brought it slicing straight so that the point halted in the air just as the scarred man reached it. He had to brake—hard—on the balls of his feet, and even so, the sword pressed nastily into the hollow of his throat at the place where his overcoat opened.
Bernard, meanwhile, curled around behind her. He set his back to hers—and not a moment too soon. There were four others and they were rushing at him from every side.
Bernard gave a raw, steamy hiss as he pressed out his ibuki breath with a tightened abdomen. His right hand described a smooth shuto-uchi—the knife-hand stroke—in the air. With that, he slipped into his fighting posture.
“Oi-ya!” he added for effect.
It seemed to work: the four men stopped short. They hovered in a semicircle around him. Each glanced at the others, waiting for someone else to break the ring of fear.
The scarred man put his hands up humorously. With the blade at his throat, he grinned even wider. There was murderous rage in his small, damp eyes.
“There’s no need for all this,” he said. “Just a word in your ear, darling. That’s all I want.”
But the other four were edging, dodging around, seeking a chink in Bernard’s defenses. Bernard kept his arms in motion before him, kept his head and eyes swinging from this side to that.
“Go on, then!” said Harper—she barked it, too loudly, she was that scared. She cursed herself for a craven old crone. “Go on and say what you have to!”
The Frankenstin monster to Bernard’s left faked a lunge. Bernard shouted. This time, his shuto-uchi sliced the air so quickly it seemed to whistle. The monster dropped back.
“You’re outnumbered, you see,” said the scarred man in a shaky voice.
“The first one to reach me wins a wheelchair,” Bernard sang back at him over Harper’s shoulder.
The four thugs kept dancing, shuffling, feinting. One waggled a box-cutter. One swished a black, mean, flexible cosh. The Frankenstein just balled his fists. Bernard kept shifting, his back to Harper’s.
“The game’s not worth the candle,” said the scarred man. Tilting his head away from the pressing sword that held him at bay, he still managed to fix Harper with his furious, piggy eyes. “I wouldn’t kid you, it isn’t, I mean it. It’s just a small thread you’ve got hold of, darling. I’m just here to tell you to let it be. Let it be and we all go home happy.”
“A small thread,” she said to him. “But perhaps I’ll pull it and see what unravels.”
At which point, the four other thugs attacked.
The box-cutter flashed out, slashed past Bernard’s windbreaker as he drew back. Bernard trapped the attacker’s wrist, twisted it. Snap. The attacker howled, his cutter clattered to the blacktop; so did he. Now Bernard’s body slanted as he drove a kansetsu kick into the space just over Frankenstein’s shin. The enormous monster staggered, toppled onto his side while, at the same time, Bernard gave a lightning flick of his inverted fist—uraken—in the other direction. It drove a third attacker’s nose into his face with a splash of cartilage and blood.
But the fourth man’s cosh got through. An upward backhand which Bernard only half blocked with his free arm. The weapon glanced off his brow. Bernard saw the sky swim and was suddenly down on one knee. The thug with the cosh moved to stand over him, planted himself just above him. With a grunt of effort, the thug lifted the blackjack high in the air, ready to slam it down with all his might into Bernard’s exposed skull.
Still kneeling, still dazed, Bernard drove his open hand up between the man’s legs and made a fist.
“Oof,” said the man.
He curled up like burning paper and went down to the pavement.
Bernard swayed unsteadily up Harper’s back. Regained his feet, leaning against her. Frankenstein and the thug with the splattered nose were already up as well, weaving around in front of him, but not quite ready to attack again. The other two were rolling in the street, clutching wrist and crotch, groaning.
The man with the scarred lip made a move in anger. Harper jabbed—hoisted him onto his tiptoes at the point of her blade.
“You know, I’m just crotchety enough to kill you,” she said.
“You stupid old slag,” the scarred man spat back. Pinned high at the end of her sword, he let his pink eyes flame down at her. “You know who you’re mucking with. He’s being good to you, isn’t he? For old time’s sake. You think he can’t finish this whenever he likes? Whenever he likes? No fear, bitch.”
Terror and fury and excitement all went through Harper in a bolt and she cut him. Jerked him off the point of her sword with a flick that nicked his chin.
The scarred man cried out, staggered backwards, grabbed at the wound with both hands. He looked down at the blood on his fingers. Cursed and stared black death at her.
“Since I am a bitch,” she said, “beware my fangs.” She had a weakness for paraphrase too.
The scarred man was speechless. Bleeding. All he could do was point at her. Point a threatening finger at her once, twice, three times—but all the while, withdrawing, fading away from her down the street, into the night. The others, seeing him go, were also starting to pull back. The two on the ground, clambering up shakily, joined the retreat. All sent dark warning glances at Bernard where he crouched, panting, with his hands up weakly before him.
And so the circle of men dissolved backwards into the shadows. They grew dimmer and dimmer, the scarred man still pointing his finger at Harper, pointing again and again.
Harper let her sword droop slowly to the blacktop. Tired. She was very tired suddenly. Her eyes, her arm, her whole body. Heavy, tired. And frightened, truly terrified. Trembling violently as the reaction set in. She could hear Bernard gasping for breath behind her. She could feel his narrow back leaning against hers. She had to lean against him as well to stay upright.
For an endless moment more, she could still make out the scarred man, retreating. She could see his pink, piggy glare, his pointing finger. An endless moment more.
Then the two of them, she and Bernard, were alone in the darkness.
4
The evening of the auction arrived and—just as Harper had feared—Sophia hanged herself. For her, it was the end of a long, dreamy day.
First thing in the morning, she had burned all her snapshots of her mother. Sitting at home, very businesslike at her escritoire. Dressed in one of the usual uniforms: blue cardigan over white blouse, pleated gray skirt. She glanced sometimes through the balcony doors, out at the gabled roofscape of South Kensington: chimneys and attic windows, a stone church spire against the solid gray sky, sedate and lovely. One after another, in the ashtray at her fingertips, the photos burned. The char closed in a rough circle over those features so like her own.
Sophia felt cool as she watched this happen. Remote and clear in her mind. Having decided what she would do, there seemed to her a very straight line of perfect clarity between her and the doing of it, an open corridor that proceeded through precise, logical and predictable steps towards the image of her own body, dangling. It was the world surrounding this corridor that appeared hazy, veiled, uncertain. It was that misty periphery which gave the day its dreamlike quality.
When she had done with the pictures, she opened the balcony doors and cleared the air, waved the smoke out over the Little Boltons with the back of her hand. Then she walked down the corridqr to the bathroom. Emptied the last load of laundry from the dryer. Folded these clothes in her bedroom, on her bed. Packed them in the suitcase that lay open there. As if she were going on a journey. She felt this would be easier for everyone and would leave less of a mess behind.
She had decided for some reason upon eight o’clock—8:00 P.M. She thought that was about when the auctioneer would reach The Magi. After that, of course, the whole situation would become impossible for her. Her father would acquire the panel, and she would be forced to choose between him and her promise to the murdered Resurrection Man. Which really was no choice at all. Either option was intolerable. How could she betray her own father? And how could she keep the secret that he was involved in something monstrous? Whoever buys The Magi … He is the Devil from Hell … Sophia was all for fortitude, but there came a time when to suffer a situation was absurd. That was the time: 8:00 P.M., when they sold The Magi, when her father bought it. So she had decided.
She finished with her clothing. Next she packed her CDs into cushioned envelopes, addressed these in her scrupulous hand. Her classical pieces—oceans of Bach mostly and some Mozart—she would send to her sister Laura. The American popular music she sometimes enjoyed—Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald—would go to her friend Tony; her brother Peter despised it. She would send him her few rock albums instead, plus the Lucian Freud poster she knew he liked.
She tidied her flat, then carried the packages to the post office on Fulham Road. It was farther away than the branch on Earl’s Court, but she found the drug dealers and fast-food restaurants near the tube stop depressing. This walk was far nicer. Past whitewashed mansions, under garden walls, through the hanging branches of cherry and chestnut trees. Forsythia that would bloom so yellow come spring. The air was cold and damp and invigorating, refreshing on her cheeks, in her hair.
As she walked, she thought some more about the face in those photographs she had burned. It had been even clearer in these than in the portrait on her wall at the Grange: while her mother’s features had been very like her own, her manner, her expression had really been quite different. They had been warmer. They had been better, Sophia thought as she walked. That sweet way she would tilt her head to one side. And the way her eyes always looked faintly worried, as if there were some service or kindness she might have neglected. Her smile was so eagerly agreeable too. Even in the Kodachrome square of past time, her generosity made itself known to her daughter. Sophia felt it with a pang. One did wonder sometimes how things might have been different …
After she had posted her packages, she took a cab to the gallery.
“Would you be a darling and go to the auction for me tonight?” she said to her assistant, Jessica. “I really don’t feel up to it.”
“You’re not ill or anything?” Jessica asked her. Blinked up at her with her limpid fawn eyes.
“I’ll be all right. You’re a brick.” Sophia squeezed the other girl’s shoulder through the soft cashmere cardigan. Very odd—but her mind was so clear now that she felt she could actually look right into Jessica’s soul, understand her down to the ground, even see into her future. Blond and cherub-cheeked, vulnerable, deferential and not terribly bright, Jessica would have her pick of the gallery’s most opulent clients. She would marry one, would enjoy his luxuries, would suffer his adultries and would learn to live for her children and her comforts, resigned and only slightly frantic. It really was very odd; Sophia looked into Jessica’s big eyes and saw the whole thing right away. She squeezed the girl’s shoulder again, with compassion this time. “Sir Michael wants The Magi,” she went on, and then wittily imitated her father’s huffy baritone, “at all costs!” Jessica smiled uncertainly. Gently, Sophia said, “It won’t go much past fifty, I’m sure, but he said he would go to three times that, so we have the wherewithal. Just be firm, you know, top the bids quickly, and you’ll scare the rest off.”
“Yes … yes, all right,” said Jessica, not very firmly at all. “If you really need me to.”
Sophia gave her an encouraging smile. It would be a big moment for her, she thought. Something to remember in her later days. On an impulse, she unclasped the brooch from her own cardigan and pinned it onto Jessica’s. “Now listen, if Antonio’s there, I want you to flirt with him a little, yah? Especially when the Antwerp lots come up, distract him. Tell him I’ve got a perfectly good Reubens Pan for him and I don’t want him spending all his money before I get my hands on some of it. Tell him I was very severe about it. He likes that; it excites him, makes him feel English or something. All right?”
“Isn’t this your mother’s brooch?”
“It just suits you. The little lapis pieces set off those flecks in your eyes.”
“Oh, but I couldn’t possibly—”
“No, I want you to wear it,” Sophia said. “It looks much better on you than it ever did on me. I’ll consider it yours until I see you again. All right?”
At that, Jessica looked so confused and grateful and admiring that Sophia’s heart welled with pity for her and her humiliating future. But she only smiled back, wryly. In her clarity, she understood that what would be, must be. And she continued down her lucid corridor, through her dreamy day.
So she came that night to sit alone in her upstairs office. The gallery closed, dark, quiet below. She swiveling idly in her black chair, only the lamp on her rolltop burning. The electric clock at the corner of the blotter told off the last quarter hour before eight. And, having decided on eight, Sophia waited, nervous now, impatient for the time to pass. She tapped her fingernail twice on the blotter’s leatherette border. Twice quickly, then twice again. Tick-tick, tick-tick.
She glanced out through the open door, out to where the lamplight died, to where the upper balcony curved along the wall into dusky nothing. She imagined her body hanging there. Hanging, turning. The paintings hanging on the wall above it: the moonstruck mountains, the cryptic glades, the seductive ruins in the grass. The body turned and turned and turned towards her and she imagined its face. The same face that had smiled up at her from the ashtray that morning, that had curled and blackened and crumbled away.
“Your mother cared very deeply about the suffering of others,” her father had told her once. “Too deeply, I sometimes thought. She wanted the world to be better than it is. She took on too much of the guilt of things: injustice, poverty and so on. We can only go by our own lights, after all, cover our own patch, you know. We can’t solve the troubles of the universe, can we?”
And no, Sophia had answered, we can’t. And yet, one did just wonder. If things might have been different. She tapped the blotter with one hand. The other moved slowly across her middle. That face, her mother’s face, was so charitable and concerned and responsive and yet so like her own, that one did just think that she, Sophia, might have been more like that herself. Had her mother lived, that is. Had she been around to teach Sophia the trick of it.
This thought only deepened her depression and loneliness, the black well of them inside her. And anyway, it was minutes to eight. She rose, switched off the lamp. Her navy overcoat hung on a stand by the door. She drew the belt from its loops even as she stepped out onto the balcony.
She walked along the balcony slowly. Now one hand slid over the rail and the other held the belt, the belt trailing. The muffled whisk of Bond Street traffic reached her. The glow of headlights rode up over the far wall. Over the paintings, over a desolation of rocks, a sunset, a figure gazing into the vanishing point. Then it was gone. The gallery was dim around her, quiet. Quiet, except for her own footsteps on the hard floor. Tick-tick, tick-tick. She thought of how she had heard that sound in her bed, how she had gone downstairs, calling for her mother. Moving to the door at the end of the corridor, the last door … After that, she couldn’t remember.
She stopped in the middle of the balcony. It seemed a likely place. She tied the belt to the rail, tested it. Made a simple slipknot in the other end and brought the loop down over her black hair. This business and the business of hopping up on the rail, of bringing her legs around to the other side, sitting on the edge of the balcony—this was the worst of the thing, the most depressing bit. It all seemed so shabby finally and miserable. And sitting there, gripping the rail, looking down, she thought unhappily: One should have been taught to love, so that help would come.
