Days of utter dread, p.4
Days of Utter Dread, page 4
‘You should go round to Nadine Frost’s apartment and introduce yourself.’
‘And say what? “I’ve been watching you take your clothes off for the past few nights, and I’ve been drooling so much that my living-room rug is totally soaked through.”’
‘No, stupid. Just politely say that you’ve recognised her, and that you loved all of her pictures, and if there’s anything she needs at any time, all she has to do is ask you.’
‘And what if she tells me to go take a running jump?’
Heidi swallowed, wiped her mouth, and then kissed him. ‘What do you have to lose?’
Jimmy sat and thought for almost half a minute. Then he said, ‘Why?’
‘Why what?’
‘Why would you want me to?’
‘Because it would make you happy. I’m your friend, aren’t I? And that’s what friends do – they make each other happy.’
‘I think you’re kinkier than I am.’
She kissed him again. ‘Thanks for the compliment.’
*
Late that night, he googled Nadine Frost and looked up her career in the movies. Nadine Frost, real name Zsuzanna Erdélyi, was born in a suburb of Budapest, Hungary, in February 1973. Her father was an electronics engineer, and the family moved to Los Angeles California in 1982 so that he could work for Modex, Inc.
Zsuzanna excelled at school, both in sport and drama, and when she was fifteen she was offered a part in the family TV drama The Lovehearts. After that, she appeared in seven more movies, and was nominated for an Oscar for her supporting role in Thunder Bay.
A month after the release of her last movie, however, she disappeared from public view, and her agent Cy Willard made a statement that she had given up her acting career and was looking for ‘seclusion and spiritual solace’. Despite the efforts of the media, her whereabouts were never discovered.
Until now, when she had unexpectedly appeared in one of Jimmy’s nightly dramas, in the Van Cortlandt Apartment block, in Manhattan.
*
He didn’t have enough nerve to go around to Nadine Frost’s apartment until two evenings later. On the first evening, he stood and watched her for over twenty minutes as she stood naked in front of her mirror. Now that he knew who she was, he found himself asking even more questions about her. Did she regret giving up her movie career? Was that why she stood in front of her mirror night after night, admiring her body? Or was she looking for something beyond her physical beauty – maybe that ‘spiritual solace’ that her agent had mentioned?
Early on the second evening, Heidi called him.
‘Did you go to see her yet?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Be brave. Go. Like I told you, what do you have to lose?’
‘I don’t know. My self-esteem?’
‘Go. Go now.’
‘I don’t know what number her apartment is.’
‘You can count, can’t you? Go.’
Reluctantly, he left his apartment, went down in the elevator and crossed the courtyard. An elderly man was sitting on one of the benches, underneath a leafless aspen. He was wearing a hat, a heavy tweed overcoat, and a scarf.
‘Evening,’ he said, as Jimmy walked by.
‘Pretty chilly out here,’ said Jimmy.
‘Oh, I’m just giving myself a little quiet time. Sometimes a body needs a little quiet time.’
‘I guess so. Me, I think I get too much of it.’
The elderly man adjusted his hat. ‘In that case, you need to find yourself a companion. Everybody should have a companion. Road of life, it’s too damn long and too damn empty to walk along it all on your ownsome.’
If Jimmy had been thinking of turning back, the elderly man’s words gave him fresh resolve to go on. He went into the lobby of the apartment block opposite, and pressed the button for the elevator. When it arrived, he looked into the window but there was nobody inside it. No naked Nadine Frost, screaming ‘You mustn’t!’
He went up to the fourth floor, and walked along the corridor to the fourth door on the right. The corridor was dimly lit, with a faded, royal-blue carpet. From all sides he could hear televisions and music and people talking. He came to the fourth door and stood in front of it, with his finger poised an inch away from the buzzer.
This was madness. He knew it was madness. She would simply tell him to go away and leave her alone. Yet he kept thinking of her reflection in the mirror, and the way that his back had almost cracked when he had made love to it.
He pressed the buzzer. Out here in the corridor, it was scarcely audible, like a blowfly in a sealed bottle. He waited, but there was no response. He knew that she was home because he had seen her switch on her living-room lights. Maybe she had taken a taken a squint at him through her peephole and decided that he looked too visually unstimulating.
He pressed the buzzer again. After a long pause, a muffled woman’s voice said, ‘Who is it?’
‘Ah – my name’s Jimmy, Ms Frost. Jimmy Lightoller. I live right opposite. I saw you move in and I wondered if you needed any help.’
An even longer pause. Then: ‘You know who I am?’
‘Couldn’t mistake you, Ms Frost. I’m one of your biggest fans. I was really sorry when you gave up making pictures. Me and about fifty million other fans.’
‘What do you really want?’
‘Truthfully? Just to be friends. There are one million six hundred thousand people in Manhattan, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be lonely.’
The next pause was so long that Jimmy thought she had lost interest, and he was almost ready to go back to his apartment.
But then she said, ‘What makes you think that I need a friend?’
‘I don’t know, Ms Frost. Just trying to be sociable, that’s all.’
Without warning, the apartment door clicked open, and stayed a few inches ajar.
‘Come on in, Jimmy,’ said Nadine Frost, although he still couldn’t see her.
‘You’re sure about this?’
‘I’m sure.’
‘I don’t like to impose or anything. It’s just that I’m such a great fan.’
‘Come on in. Don’t be shy.’
Jimmy stepped into the apartment. As he did so, he saw Nadine Frost disappearing through the living room, heading towards the bedroom. She was wearing a long white satin robe, with a hood, so that she looked like a ghost.
‘I’ll – ah – I’ll close the door, shall I?’ Jimmy called out.
‘Of course,’ she called back.
He closed the door and walked into the middle of the living room. It was plainly furnished with dull Swedish-style furniture – oatmeal-coloured chairs and a pine coffee table, and a pottery jar with dried bulrushes in it. On one side of the room hung a large multiple portrait of Nadine Frost in all of the major roles she had played – as the heiress to a cotton plantation, as an Egyptian queen, as a female aviator, as a frontierswoman, as a prostitute with a heart of gold.
‘Fantastic picture,’ he said, loudly.
‘You like it?’
‘Fantastic. If you don’t mind my saying so, you really look terrific.’
‘Only “terrific”?’
‘Well… beautiful. You really look beautiful.’
He waited. He wondered what she was doing in the bedroom, and whether he ought to sit down and make himself at home.
‘So, you think I’m beautiful?’ she said.
‘No other word for it.’
Another pause. Then: ‘I’ve seen you watching me, Jimmy. It was you, wasn’t it?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Oh, don’t try to pretend. I saw you watching the very first night I moved in. That’s why I put on my little show for you.’
‘I don’t know what you mean. I really don’t.’
‘Oh, come on, Jimmy. You don’t have to pretend. You stood in your window and you watched me for hours.’
Jimmy felt himself flushing hot with embarrassment. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all. Maybe I’d better leave.’
‘No, Jimmy, don’t do that. Come into the bedroom and see me as I really am.’
‘Listen, please. I’m sorry if you thought I was spying on you. I really wasn’t. It’s just that I saw you in your mirror – only a few seconds’ glimpse – and – well, you’re beautiful. That’s all I can say, except that I’m sorry.’
‘You saw me in my mirror?’
‘Only a few seconds’ glimpse, I swear it.’
‘You saw me in my mirror?’
‘Yes.’
‘Come into the bedroom, Jimmy.’
Jimmy hesitated, and then he walked out of the living room and into the corridor. The bedroom door was half-open, and up against the left-hand wall he could see the full-length mirror, framed in gilt. And there was the image of Nadine Frost, utterly naked, smiling.
Except that the full-length mirror wasn’t a mirror at all. It was a full-length painting, in oils. Meticulously detailed, highly realistic, but only a painting.
‘Come on in,’ Nadine Frost repeated. ‘Come and see me as I really am.’
It was only now that Jimmy noticed a curious whistling sound in her voice, followed by the soft cackle of phlegm at the end of every phrase.
‘I think I’ve made a mistake,’ he said. ‘I think it’s probably better if I go.’
‘No, Jimmy. I wouldn’t go, not if I were you. You wouldn’t want me to cause a fuss, would you? A peeping Tom who forced his way into my apartment, and tried to assault me?’
‘I’ll just go,’ said Jimmy, his voice rising in panic.
‘Don’t you want to take advantage of me first?’
‘What?’
‘It’s been a long time since a man took advantage of me. Not once in seven years, ever since my accident. Come on, Jimmy. Think of what we could do together. Deep throat, with a woman with no face. You could actually watch it as it disappeared.’
The bedroom door opened wider. Nadine Frost was standing in front of him now, in her white hooded robe. Inside the hood, he could see her eyes glittering, but underneath her eyes there was nothing but shadows.
‘Oh, God,’ he said, and sank to his knees, his head bowed.
Nadine Frost came up to him and rested her hands lightly on his shoulders. ‘Come on, Jimmy,’ she said. ‘You and I are going to be wonderful together.’
She twisted her shoulders so that her satin robe whispered to the floor. Jimmy raised his head and her plume of russet hair was right in front of him.
Then he looked up.
ON GRACIOUS POND
‘They took them for a walk, Hetty and Emily and Charlotte,’ said Louisa, ‘but they never came back.’
‘Who took them for a walk?’ Charles asked her, looking up from his pencil drawing of a fat, grumpy queen. The late summer sunlight was slanting in through the window behind Louisa, so that it looked as if her plaits were on fire.
‘Sir Walter What’s-his-name and that funny Mr Sawyer.’
‘Oh, you mean Sir Walter Warboys. But what’s funny about Mr Sawyer?’
‘I don’t know. He’s always sniffing. Sniff, sniff, sniff, as if he’s got a cold, although he hasn’t. And he speaks like a puppy whining. And he smells.’
‘What of?’
Louisa thought for a moment, wrinkling up her nose as if she were trying to recreate Mr Sawyer’s smell.
‘Like sardines,’ she said, at last.
Charles shaded in the queen’s gown, and drew pointy black arrows on its ermine lining.
‘And when was this?’ he asked. ‘I’m sure saw all three girls the last time I came to visit, and that was only last Monday.’
‘Wednesday, I think. Yes, Wednesday.’
‘Did you ask where they’d gone?’
‘Yes. I asked Mrs Silver, but all she said was they’d been adopted.’
‘Perhaps they had.’
‘But they hadn’t even come back from their walk. When one of us gets adopted, their new parents usually come here to help them to pack up all their belongings, and they always say a proper goodbye to everybody.’
‘Perhaps they had arranged to meet their new parents elsewhere.’
‘Well, yes, I suppose they might. But they didn’t take their clothes or anything else. All their belongings were still there the next morning. Even Emily’s ballerina doll, and she never went to bed without her ballerina doll. It was nearly bedtime on Thursday before anybody came to take away their dresses and their nightgowns and their shoes and everything else. Netty and Wilhelmina stuffed them all into the same hamper willy-nilly and carried them off, and that was that.’
Charles put down his pencil. ‘I’m not sure I like the sound of this. I think I might have a word with Mrs Silver myself.’
‘She was jolly cross when I asked her. She said that I should learn to mind my own beeswax.’
‘Well, I’m sure she won’t say the same to me. Look – here’s the Queen of Hearts I’ve drawn for you. She’s very grumpy because her gardeners have painted her roses all the wrong colour. She says, “Off with their heads!”’
‘I know, because I’ve read it,’ said Louisa. ‘We weren’t supposed to but Caroline borrowed a copy from the bookshop in town. Well, stole it actually, but she’s going to sneak it back. Mrs Silver says she doesn’t approve of nonsensical stories. The only book she allows us to read is the Bible.’
Charles handed Louisa the drawing and tucked his pencil into his waistcoat pocket.
‘I’ll see you next week,’ he told her. ‘I’m staying with my sisters until the end of the month, but then I have to go back to Oxford.’
Louisa held up the drawing and stared at it for a long time. She was painfully thin, and pale, and although she was thirteen years old, she was small for her age, like most of the orphans at The Beeches. All the same, Charles thought she had a strange dark-eyed beauty about her, like a nymph that you might find bathing in a forest pool. He decided to bring his camera with him next week, and take some photographs of her in the orphanage garden.
As he reached the door, Louisa said, ‘May I ask you a question? I hope you won’t think that I’m being impertinent.’
She wasn’t looking at him. She was still staring at his drawing.
‘Of course you may,’ he replied. ‘You can be as impertinent as you like. The queen won’t be cross. She’s two-dimensional, and made of graphite, nothing more.’
‘Well, my question is – what’s it like inside your head?’
Charles stood with his hand against the doorframe, feeling unexpectedly sad. He thought for a while, and then he said, ‘It’s like a seashore. A seashore with the gulls crying and the tide endlessly lapping and the sun shining on the waves. Not a cloud in the sky, and nobody there but me.’
‘Not even a fishing boat?’
‘Not even a fishing boat.’
Louisa turned now and looked at him, and the expression on her face was extraordinary for a girl so young, and from a background of such abuse and deprivation. It was one of pity, but of understanding, too, as if she knew exactly what he was talking about. Almost as if she had stood on that seashore herself, once upon a time, her plain brown dress flapping in the wind, feeling as lost as he did.
Charles gave her a quick non-committal smile. He really had no idea what to say to her. He went down the creaking mahogany stairs to the ground floor and then along the corridor to Mrs Silver’s drawing room. Its door was open, and he could see Mrs Silver at her desk, writing a letter. Her lips were pinched as if she were sucking a lemon drop, so that her words would come out as acidic as possible. Her iron-grey hair was wrapped up tightly in a bun, with two long hairpins sticking through it, and her pince-nez were perched on the very tip of her nose.
She looked up as Charles appeared in her doorway, but he knocked all the same.
‘You’re leaving so soon, Reverend Dodgson?’ she asked him. ‘Have you had enough of my girls already? I thought you might stay for luncheon. Cook is baking a mutton pie today.’
‘I have to take my sister Henrietta to the doctor’s, Mrs Silver, although it’s nothing serious. But I’ll be back next Thursday, if that’s convenient. I’ll have some new stories I can read to the girls.’
‘So long as they’re none of your usual gammon and spinach. Talking playing cards and such piffle.’
Charles cleared his throat. ‘I didn’t see Charlotte today. Or Emily, or Hetty. Apparently they were taken for a walk by Sir Walter Warboys and his companion Mr Sawyer but never returned.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘I don’t think it really matters who told me. I was simply wondering what had become of them.’
Mrs Silver took off her pince-nez. Charles thought that he had never seen eyes so grey and expressionless. They were more like pebbles from his lonely seashore than eyes.
‘The three of them were all adopted,’ said Mrs Silver. She had retained her Mancunian accent, speaking in a Northern monotone that betrayed no emotion whatsoever. ‘Sir Walter and Mr Sawyer took them up to London to meet their new parents.’
‘Really? So why did they leave all their clothes and their belongings behind? Even a favourite doll, from what I was told? They didn’t even say goodbye to all of their friends here.’
‘They had no need to take their things, Reverend Dodgson. Their new parents are all very well-heeled and will buy them all the dresses and dolls they require, and much more. They didn’t say goodbye to their friends here at The Beeches because they believed it would be too upsetting.’
‘Their friends are more upset that they vanished without a word.’
Mrs Silver stood up and walked around her desk. She came up close to Charles and stared up at him. He was over six feet tall, and she was a foot shorter, but in spite of that he felt menaced.
‘You’re a good man, with good intentions – I’ll grant you that. When you visit you bring the girls laughter and amusement and you also give them a glimmer of hope for their futures. But you’re a weaver of fantastical tales, and you shouldn’t start to weave fantastical tales about the way this orphanage is managed, and how we handle the girls’ adoptions. In other words, Reverend, I’m politely asking that you keep your nose out.’
‘And say what? “I’ve been watching you take your clothes off for the past few nights, and I’ve been drooling so much that my living-room rug is totally soaked through.”’
‘No, stupid. Just politely say that you’ve recognised her, and that you loved all of her pictures, and if there’s anything she needs at any time, all she has to do is ask you.’
‘And what if she tells me to go take a running jump?’
Heidi swallowed, wiped her mouth, and then kissed him. ‘What do you have to lose?’
Jimmy sat and thought for almost half a minute. Then he said, ‘Why?’
‘Why what?’
‘Why would you want me to?’
‘Because it would make you happy. I’m your friend, aren’t I? And that’s what friends do – they make each other happy.’
‘I think you’re kinkier than I am.’
She kissed him again. ‘Thanks for the compliment.’
*
Late that night, he googled Nadine Frost and looked up her career in the movies. Nadine Frost, real name Zsuzanna Erdélyi, was born in a suburb of Budapest, Hungary, in February 1973. Her father was an electronics engineer, and the family moved to Los Angeles California in 1982 so that he could work for Modex, Inc.
Zsuzanna excelled at school, both in sport and drama, and when she was fifteen she was offered a part in the family TV drama The Lovehearts. After that, she appeared in seven more movies, and was nominated for an Oscar for her supporting role in Thunder Bay.
A month after the release of her last movie, however, she disappeared from public view, and her agent Cy Willard made a statement that she had given up her acting career and was looking for ‘seclusion and spiritual solace’. Despite the efforts of the media, her whereabouts were never discovered.
Until now, when she had unexpectedly appeared in one of Jimmy’s nightly dramas, in the Van Cortlandt Apartment block, in Manhattan.
*
He didn’t have enough nerve to go around to Nadine Frost’s apartment until two evenings later. On the first evening, he stood and watched her for over twenty minutes as she stood naked in front of her mirror. Now that he knew who she was, he found himself asking even more questions about her. Did she regret giving up her movie career? Was that why she stood in front of her mirror night after night, admiring her body? Or was she looking for something beyond her physical beauty – maybe that ‘spiritual solace’ that her agent had mentioned?
Early on the second evening, Heidi called him.
‘Did you go to see her yet?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Be brave. Go. Like I told you, what do you have to lose?’
‘I don’t know. My self-esteem?’
‘Go. Go now.’
‘I don’t know what number her apartment is.’
‘You can count, can’t you? Go.’
Reluctantly, he left his apartment, went down in the elevator and crossed the courtyard. An elderly man was sitting on one of the benches, underneath a leafless aspen. He was wearing a hat, a heavy tweed overcoat, and a scarf.
‘Evening,’ he said, as Jimmy walked by.
‘Pretty chilly out here,’ said Jimmy.
‘Oh, I’m just giving myself a little quiet time. Sometimes a body needs a little quiet time.’
‘I guess so. Me, I think I get too much of it.’
The elderly man adjusted his hat. ‘In that case, you need to find yourself a companion. Everybody should have a companion. Road of life, it’s too damn long and too damn empty to walk along it all on your ownsome.’
If Jimmy had been thinking of turning back, the elderly man’s words gave him fresh resolve to go on. He went into the lobby of the apartment block opposite, and pressed the button for the elevator. When it arrived, he looked into the window but there was nobody inside it. No naked Nadine Frost, screaming ‘You mustn’t!’
He went up to the fourth floor, and walked along the corridor to the fourth door on the right. The corridor was dimly lit, with a faded, royal-blue carpet. From all sides he could hear televisions and music and people talking. He came to the fourth door and stood in front of it, with his finger poised an inch away from the buzzer.
This was madness. He knew it was madness. She would simply tell him to go away and leave her alone. Yet he kept thinking of her reflection in the mirror, and the way that his back had almost cracked when he had made love to it.
He pressed the buzzer. Out here in the corridor, it was scarcely audible, like a blowfly in a sealed bottle. He waited, but there was no response. He knew that she was home because he had seen her switch on her living-room lights. Maybe she had taken a taken a squint at him through her peephole and decided that he looked too visually unstimulating.
He pressed the buzzer again. After a long pause, a muffled woman’s voice said, ‘Who is it?’
‘Ah – my name’s Jimmy, Ms Frost. Jimmy Lightoller. I live right opposite. I saw you move in and I wondered if you needed any help.’
An even longer pause. Then: ‘You know who I am?’
‘Couldn’t mistake you, Ms Frost. I’m one of your biggest fans. I was really sorry when you gave up making pictures. Me and about fifty million other fans.’
‘What do you really want?’
‘Truthfully? Just to be friends. There are one million six hundred thousand people in Manhattan, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be lonely.’
The next pause was so long that Jimmy thought she had lost interest, and he was almost ready to go back to his apartment.
But then she said, ‘What makes you think that I need a friend?’
‘I don’t know, Ms Frost. Just trying to be sociable, that’s all.’
Without warning, the apartment door clicked open, and stayed a few inches ajar.
‘Come on in, Jimmy,’ said Nadine Frost, although he still couldn’t see her.
‘You’re sure about this?’
‘I’m sure.’
‘I don’t like to impose or anything. It’s just that I’m such a great fan.’
‘Come on in. Don’t be shy.’
Jimmy stepped into the apartment. As he did so, he saw Nadine Frost disappearing through the living room, heading towards the bedroom. She was wearing a long white satin robe, with a hood, so that she looked like a ghost.
‘I’ll – ah – I’ll close the door, shall I?’ Jimmy called out.
‘Of course,’ she called back.
He closed the door and walked into the middle of the living room. It was plainly furnished with dull Swedish-style furniture – oatmeal-coloured chairs and a pine coffee table, and a pottery jar with dried bulrushes in it. On one side of the room hung a large multiple portrait of Nadine Frost in all of the major roles she had played – as the heiress to a cotton plantation, as an Egyptian queen, as a female aviator, as a frontierswoman, as a prostitute with a heart of gold.
‘Fantastic picture,’ he said, loudly.
‘You like it?’
‘Fantastic. If you don’t mind my saying so, you really look terrific.’
‘Only “terrific”?’
‘Well… beautiful. You really look beautiful.’
He waited. He wondered what she was doing in the bedroom, and whether he ought to sit down and make himself at home.
‘So, you think I’m beautiful?’ she said.
‘No other word for it.’
Another pause. Then: ‘I’ve seen you watching me, Jimmy. It was you, wasn’t it?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Oh, don’t try to pretend. I saw you watching the very first night I moved in. That’s why I put on my little show for you.’
‘I don’t know what you mean. I really don’t.’
‘Oh, come on, Jimmy. You don’t have to pretend. You stood in your window and you watched me for hours.’
Jimmy felt himself flushing hot with embarrassment. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all. Maybe I’d better leave.’
‘No, Jimmy, don’t do that. Come into the bedroom and see me as I really am.’
‘Listen, please. I’m sorry if you thought I was spying on you. I really wasn’t. It’s just that I saw you in your mirror – only a few seconds’ glimpse – and – well, you’re beautiful. That’s all I can say, except that I’m sorry.’
‘You saw me in my mirror?’
‘Only a few seconds’ glimpse, I swear it.’
‘You saw me in my mirror?’
‘Yes.’
‘Come into the bedroom, Jimmy.’
Jimmy hesitated, and then he walked out of the living room and into the corridor. The bedroom door was half-open, and up against the left-hand wall he could see the full-length mirror, framed in gilt. And there was the image of Nadine Frost, utterly naked, smiling.
Except that the full-length mirror wasn’t a mirror at all. It was a full-length painting, in oils. Meticulously detailed, highly realistic, but only a painting.
‘Come on in,’ Nadine Frost repeated. ‘Come and see me as I really am.’
It was only now that Jimmy noticed a curious whistling sound in her voice, followed by the soft cackle of phlegm at the end of every phrase.
‘I think I’ve made a mistake,’ he said. ‘I think it’s probably better if I go.’
‘No, Jimmy. I wouldn’t go, not if I were you. You wouldn’t want me to cause a fuss, would you? A peeping Tom who forced his way into my apartment, and tried to assault me?’
‘I’ll just go,’ said Jimmy, his voice rising in panic.
‘Don’t you want to take advantage of me first?’
‘What?’
‘It’s been a long time since a man took advantage of me. Not once in seven years, ever since my accident. Come on, Jimmy. Think of what we could do together. Deep throat, with a woman with no face. You could actually watch it as it disappeared.’
The bedroom door opened wider. Nadine Frost was standing in front of him now, in her white hooded robe. Inside the hood, he could see her eyes glittering, but underneath her eyes there was nothing but shadows.
‘Oh, God,’ he said, and sank to his knees, his head bowed.
Nadine Frost came up to him and rested her hands lightly on his shoulders. ‘Come on, Jimmy,’ she said. ‘You and I are going to be wonderful together.’
She twisted her shoulders so that her satin robe whispered to the floor. Jimmy raised his head and her plume of russet hair was right in front of him.
Then he looked up.
ON GRACIOUS POND
‘They took them for a walk, Hetty and Emily and Charlotte,’ said Louisa, ‘but they never came back.’
‘Who took them for a walk?’ Charles asked her, looking up from his pencil drawing of a fat, grumpy queen. The late summer sunlight was slanting in through the window behind Louisa, so that it looked as if her plaits were on fire.
‘Sir Walter What’s-his-name and that funny Mr Sawyer.’
‘Oh, you mean Sir Walter Warboys. But what’s funny about Mr Sawyer?’
‘I don’t know. He’s always sniffing. Sniff, sniff, sniff, as if he’s got a cold, although he hasn’t. And he speaks like a puppy whining. And he smells.’
‘What of?’
Louisa thought for a moment, wrinkling up her nose as if she were trying to recreate Mr Sawyer’s smell.
‘Like sardines,’ she said, at last.
Charles shaded in the queen’s gown, and drew pointy black arrows on its ermine lining.
‘And when was this?’ he asked. ‘I’m sure saw all three girls the last time I came to visit, and that was only last Monday.’
‘Wednesday, I think. Yes, Wednesday.’
‘Did you ask where they’d gone?’
‘Yes. I asked Mrs Silver, but all she said was they’d been adopted.’
‘Perhaps they had.’
‘But they hadn’t even come back from their walk. When one of us gets adopted, their new parents usually come here to help them to pack up all their belongings, and they always say a proper goodbye to everybody.’
‘Perhaps they had arranged to meet their new parents elsewhere.’
‘Well, yes, I suppose they might. But they didn’t take their clothes or anything else. All their belongings were still there the next morning. Even Emily’s ballerina doll, and she never went to bed without her ballerina doll. It was nearly bedtime on Thursday before anybody came to take away their dresses and their nightgowns and their shoes and everything else. Netty and Wilhelmina stuffed them all into the same hamper willy-nilly and carried them off, and that was that.’
Charles put down his pencil. ‘I’m not sure I like the sound of this. I think I might have a word with Mrs Silver myself.’
‘She was jolly cross when I asked her. She said that I should learn to mind my own beeswax.’
‘Well, I’m sure she won’t say the same to me. Look – here’s the Queen of Hearts I’ve drawn for you. She’s very grumpy because her gardeners have painted her roses all the wrong colour. She says, “Off with their heads!”’
‘I know, because I’ve read it,’ said Louisa. ‘We weren’t supposed to but Caroline borrowed a copy from the bookshop in town. Well, stole it actually, but she’s going to sneak it back. Mrs Silver says she doesn’t approve of nonsensical stories. The only book she allows us to read is the Bible.’
Charles handed Louisa the drawing and tucked his pencil into his waistcoat pocket.
‘I’ll see you next week,’ he told her. ‘I’m staying with my sisters until the end of the month, but then I have to go back to Oxford.’
Louisa held up the drawing and stared at it for a long time. She was painfully thin, and pale, and although she was thirteen years old, she was small for her age, like most of the orphans at The Beeches. All the same, Charles thought she had a strange dark-eyed beauty about her, like a nymph that you might find bathing in a forest pool. He decided to bring his camera with him next week, and take some photographs of her in the orphanage garden.
As he reached the door, Louisa said, ‘May I ask you a question? I hope you won’t think that I’m being impertinent.’
She wasn’t looking at him. She was still staring at his drawing.
‘Of course you may,’ he replied. ‘You can be as impertinent as you like. The queen won’t be cross. She’s two-dimensional, and made of graphite, nothing more.’
‘Well, my question is – what’s it like inside your head?’
Charles stood with his hand against the doorframe, feeling unexpectedly sad. He thought for a while, and then he said, ‘It’s like a seashore. A seashore with the gulls crying and the tide endlessly lapping and the sun shining on the waves. Not a cloud in the sky, and nobody there but me.’
‘Not even a fishing boat?’
‘Not even a fishing boat.’
Louisa turned now and looked at him, and the expression on her face was extraordinary for a girl so young, and from a background of such abuse and deprivation. It was one of pity, but of understanding, too, as if she knew exactly what he was talking about. Almost as if she had stood on that seashore herself, once upon a time, her plain brown dress flapping in the wind, feeling as lost as he did.
Charles gave her a quick non-committal smile. He really had no idea what to say to her. He went down the creaking mahogany stairs to the ground floor and then along the corridor to Mrs Silver’s drawing room. Its door was open, and he could see Mrs Silver at her desk, writing a letter. Her lips were pinched as if she were sucking a lemon drop, so that her words would come out as acidic as possible. Her iron-grey hair was wrapped up tightly in a bun, with two long hairpins sticking through it, and her pince-nez were perched on the very tip of her nose.
She looked up as Charles appeared in her doorway, but he knocked all the same.
‘You’re leaving so soon, Reverend Dodgson?’ she asked him. ‘Have you had enough of my girls already? I thought you might stay for luncheon. Cook is baking a mutton pie today.’
‘I have to take my sister Henrietta to the doctor’s, Mrs Silver, although it’s nothing serious. But I’ll be back next Thursday, if that’s convenient. I’ll have some new stories I can read to the girls.’
‘So long as they’re none of your usual gammon and spinach. Talking playing cards and such piffle.’
Charles cleared his throat. ‘I didn’t see Charlotte today. Or Emily, or Hetty. Apparently they were taken for a walk by Sir Walter Warboys and his companion Mr Sawyer but never returned.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘I don’t think it really matters who told me. I was simply wondering what had become of them.’
Mrs Silver took off her pince-nez. Charles thought that he had never seen eyes so grey and expressionless. They were more like pebbles from his lonely seashore than eyes.
‘The three of them were all adopted,’ said Mrs Silver. She had retained her Mancunian accent, speaking in a Northern monotone that betrayed no emotion whatsoever. ‘Sir Walter and Mr Sawyer took them up to London to meet their new parents.’
‘Really? So why did they leave all their clothes and their belongings behind? Even a favourite doll, from what I was told? They didn’t even say goodbye to all of their friends here.’
‘They had no need to take their things, Reverend Dodgson. Their new parents are all very well-heeled and will buy them all the dresses and dolls they require, and much more. They didn’t say goodbye to their friends here at The Beeches because they believed it would be too upsetting.’
‘Their friends are more upset that they vanished without a word.’
Mrs Silver stood up and walked around her desk. She came up close to Charles and stared up at him. He was over six feet tall, and she was a foot shorter, but in spite of that he felt menaced.
‘You’re a good man, with good intentions – I’ll grant you that. When you visit you bring the girls laughter and amusement and you also give them a glimmer of hope for their futures. But you’re a weaver of fantastical tales, and you shouldn’t start to weave fantastical tales about the way this orphanage is managed, and how we handle the girls’ adoptions. In other words, Reverend, I’m politely asking that you keep your nose out.’
