A Dark Dividing (2 page)

E
XCEPT THAT THE drinks were better than he had expected and the food more plentiful, the opening of Thorne’s gallery was almost exactly as Harry had predicted. Expensively voiced people milling around and murmuring things about paintings. Females covertly pricing each other’s outfits. Good lighting and nicely grained wooden floorboards.

There were no dismembered sheep or flayed corpses, and no unseemly displays of avant-garde or existentialism, in fact some of the paintings were rather good.

Whatever the house had been in its previous incarnations it lent itself very well to its present existence. It was a tall narrow building and either Angelica Thorne’s taste was more restrained than her legend suggested or the London Planners had wielded a heavy hand, because the outside had hardly been tampered with at all. The paintings appeared to be grouped on the ground floor with the photographs upstairs. Harry made a few suggestions to the photographer he had brought with him, and then left him to get on with it.

There were quite a few decorative females around-Harry spotted Angelica Thorne early on. She appeared to be embracing the Bloomsbury ambience with the fervour of a convert; either that or someone had recently told her she resembled a Burne-Jones painting, because the hair was unmistakably pre-Raphaelite—a corrugated riot of burnished copper—and the outfit was suggestive of flowing cravats and velvet tea-gowns.

Of Simone Marriot, or anyone who might conceivably be Simone Marriot, there was no sign. Harry propped himself up against a door-frame and scribbled down a few semi-famous names more or less at random to keep Markovitch sweet, and to let people know that he was press and might therefore be expected to behave erratically. After this he helped himself to another glass of Chablis and went up to the second floor.

There were not so many people at this level. That might be because it was still early in the evening and they had not yet permeated this far, or it might be that the wine was still flowing downstairs, or it might even be that the wine had flowed a bit too well for most of them already and the narrow open stairway presented an awkward challenge. (‘Break my neck by falling downstairs in front of Angelica Thorne’s upmarket cronies? Not likely,’ most of them had probably said.)

But even after several glasses of wine Harry negotiated the stairway easily enough. He came around the last tortuous spiral and stepped out on to the second floor which had the same pleasing Regency windows as downstairs. There was even a view of the British Museum through one of them. Nice. He began to move slowly along the line of framed prints.

There were two surprises.

The first was the photographs themselves. They were very good indeed and they were thought-provoking in rather a disturbing way. A lot of them used the device of illusion, so that at first glance an image appeared to be ordinary and unthreatening, but when you looked again it presented an entirely different image. Nothing’s quite as it seems in any of them, thought Harry, pausing in front of a shot of a darkened room with brooding shapes that might have been shrouded furniture, but that might as easily be something more sinister. The outline of tree branches beyond a window formed themselves into prison-bars and one branch had broken away and hung down, giving the false image of a coiled rope, knotted into what might be a hanging noose. Harry stared at this last one for a long time, the noise of the party fading out.

‘Do you like that one?’ said a voice at his side. ‘It isn’t exactly my favourite, but it’s not bad. Oh—I should explain that I’m not trying to pick you up or anything. I’m Simone Marriot and this is my bit of Thorne’s Gallery so I’m meant to be circulating and making intelligent conversation to the guests.’

Simone Marriot was the second surprise of the evening.

‘I thought you looked as if you might be easier to talk to than most of the others,’ she said. ‘I’m not sure why I thought that.’

They were sitting on one of the narrow windowsills by this time, with the sun setting somewhere beyond the skyline and the scents of the old house warm all around them. The party downstairs seemed to be breaking up, and Angelica Thorne’s voice could be heard organizing some of them into a sub-party for a late dinner somewhere.

Simone had longish dark brown hair with glinting red lights in it, cut in layers so that it curved round to frame her face. She wore an anonymous dark sweater over a plain, narrow-fitting skirt, with black lace-up boots, and the only touch of colour was a long tasselled silk scarf wound around her neck, in a vivid jade green. At first look there was nothing very outstanding about her, she was small and thin and Harry thought she was very nearly plain. But when she began to talk about the photographs he revised his opinion. Her eyes—which were the same colour as the silk scarf—glowed with enthusiasm, lighting up her whole face, and when she smiled it showed a tiny chip in her front tooth that made her look unexpectedly
gamine
. Harry found himself wanting to see her smile again.

‘I like your work very much,’ he said. ‘Although some of it makes me feel uneasy.’

‘Such as the barred window and the tree that might be a hangman’s noose?’

‘Yes. But I like the way you identify the darkness in things, and then let just a fragment of it show through. In most of the shots you’ve disguised it as something else though. A tree branch, or a piece of furniture, or a shadow.’

Simone looked pleased but she only said, ‘I like finding a subject and then seeing if there’s a dark underside.’

‘Isn’t there a dark underside in most things?’

She looked at him as if unsure whether he was baiting her. But she seemed satisfied that he was not; she said, ‘Yes, in almost everything, isn’t there? That’s the really interesting part for me: shooting the darkness.’

‘Can I see the photographs again? With you as guide this time?’

‘Yes, of course. Hold on, I’ll refill your glass first.’

She hopped down from the windowsill. She was not especially graceful, but she was intensely watchable and Harry suddenly wondered if she had inherited the quality that had put that wistful note into Markovitch’s voice when he spoke of her mother.

They moved along the line of framed photos together. ‘I like comparing the kempt and the unkempt as well,’ said Simone. ‘When I was doing this sequence over here—’

‘National Trust versus derelict squats.’

‘Yes. Yes. When I was doing those I saved the really decrepit shots for the last. Like when you’re a child and you eat the crust of a fruit pie first and save the squidgy fruit bit for last. This one’s Powys Castle. It’s one of the old border fortresses and parts of it have hardly changed since the thirteen-hundreds. It’s beautiful, isn’t it? Ruined but glossily ruined, and the ruins are being nicely preserved so there’s a bit of the past that’s caught and frozen for ever.’

‘And then to balance it you’ve got this.’

He thought she hesitated for a second, but then she said, ‘That’s a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century mansion. It’s meant to illustrate the past dying—the place has been neglected for years, in fact it’s decaying where it stands. Actually, it’s a vanity thing to have included that one—it’s a shot I took when I was about twelve with my very first camera and I always felt a bit sentimental about it. But I thought it was just about good enough to include as contrast in this sequence.’

‘It is good enough. Where is it?’ said Harry, leaning closer to see the title.

‘It’s called Mortmain House,’ said Simone. ‘It’s on the edge of Shropshire—the western boundary, just about where England crosses over into Wales. I lived there for a while as a child.’

‘Mortmain. Dead hand?’

‘Yes. Somewhere around the Middle Ages people used to transfer land to the Church so their children wouldn’t have to pay feudal dues after they died. Then the heirs reclaimed the land afterwards. It was a pretty good scam until people tumbled to what was happening, so a law was drawn up to prevent it—the law of dead man’s hand it’s sometimes called and—Am I talking too much?’

‘No, I’m interested. It looks,’ said Harry, his eyes still on the place Simone had called Mortmain House, ‘exactly like the classic nightmare mansion.’

‘It does rather, doesn’t it?’ Her voice was just a bit too casual. ‘I haven’t exaggerated its appearance, though. It really does look like that.’

‘Filled with darkness? With nightmares?’

‘Well, nightmares are subjective, aren’t they? We’ve all got a private one.’

Harry looked down at her. The top of her head was about level with his shoulder. He said, ‘“I could be bounded in a nutshell and still count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.”’

‘Yes.
Yes
.’ She smiled, as if pleased to find that he understood, and Harry wondered what she would do if he said, ‘We all have a secret nightmare, but what you don’t know, my dear, is that I’m here to see if I can wind back Time or find a pathway into the past…’

He did not say it, of course. Never blow your cover unless it’s a question of life or death.

He said, ‘Is it a particular quality of yours to see the darknesses in life?’

Simone hoped she had not banged on for too long about darknesses and Mortmain House and everything, to the journalist from the
Bellman
. But he had seemed to understand—he had quoted that bit about nightmares—and he had appeared genuinely interested.

So it was vaguely daunting when Angelica, conducting a breathless post-mortem on the opening two days later, reported that Harry Fitzglen had phoned to ask her out to dinner.

‘How nice.’ Simone refused to be jealous of Angelica, who was giving her this terrific opportunity. People hardly ever mentioned Angelica without adding, ‘She’s
the
Angelica Thorne, you know—one of the real
It
girls in the Nineties. Dozens of lovers and scores of the most extraordinary parties. There’s not much she hasn’t tried,’ they said. But one of the things that Angelica was trying now was being a patron of the arts, and one of the people she was patronizing was Simone, and for all Simone cared Angelica could have tried necromancy and cannibalism. She refused to be jealous because Harry Fitzglen was taking Angelica out to dinner, even when Angelica, smiling the smile that made her look like a mischievous cat, said they were going to Aubergine in Chelsea.

‘If he can afford Aubergine, he must be pretty successful.’

‘I like successful. In fact—Oh God, is this the electricity bill for the first quarter? Well, it can’t possibly be right—look at the
total
! We can’t have used all that heating, do they think we’re
orchids
or something, for pity’s sake!’

They were in the upstairs office in the Bloomsbury gallery. Simone loved this narrow sliver of a building, tucked away in a tiny London square, surrounded by small, smart PR companies, and hopeful new publishing houses, and unexpected bits of the University or the Museum that seemed to have become detached from their main buildings and taken up residence in convenient corners. The office was small because they had partitioned it off from the rest of the attic floor, wanting to keep as much gallery space as they could, but from up here you could see across rooftops and just glimpse a corner of the British Museum, a bit blurry because the windows of the house were the original ones and they had become wavy with age.

Simone liked the scents of the house as well, which despite the renovations were still the scents of an earlier era. In the late 1800s and early 1900s Bloomsbury had been the fashionable place for what people called intellectuals—writers and painters and poets. There were times when she had the feeling that it might be possible to look through a chink somewhere and glimpse the house’s past, and see them all in their candlelit rooms, discussing and arguing and working—No, it would not have been candlelight by then, it would have been gaslight. Not quite so romantic.

Still, it would be nice to trace the house’s history; Simone would love to know the kind of people who had lived here when it had been an ordinary private house. She and Angelica might set up a small display about it: they might even find some old photographs that could be restored. Would Harry Fitzglen have access to old newspaper archives and photographic agencies? Could Angelica be asked to sound him out about it? Angelica was enthusiastic about Thorne’s but the enthusiasm might not stretch to discussing marketing strategies with a new man.