A Dark Dividing (9 page)
Authors: Sarah Rayne
A larger house would be needed, but once he had been elected they would most likely have to move anyway. To something gracious and mellow—eighteenth-century, perhaps. Large gardens and velvety lawns for the twins and their friends. Even a small tennis court, and a paddock for a pony. Two ponies. ‘
Joe Anderson, who is tipped for a place in the next Cabinet reshuffle, caught in a happy, off
-
duty moment with his twins at the local point
-
to
-
point…
’
And now these delightful visions were meaningless and false. Really, it was too bad of life to play such a trick.
Or was it? How would it be if one took this thing on board? Even turned it to advantage? He considered the possibilities carefully. Once the twins had had the operation to separate them all news value and sympathy value would go, of course, but while they were still joined he might get quite a lot of mileage out of it. He could talk worriedly about the ethics of separation and his own religious convictions and he could disclose his own agony at having to put the babies at risk. That was all the kind of thing that voters would go for.
He might even start to work for one or two children’s charities as a result of the twins’ condition—‘
Mr Joseph Anderson, whose life holds a deep sadness, but who works tirelessly for children’s charities…
’ Ah, now that
was
a good idea. He could talk modestly about the twins’ tragedy guiding him into those areas, and people would speak of him as a caring man. ‘
Joseph Anderson pictured outside Buckingham Palace, after receiving his OBE for services to children
…’ He would ask around at the Council offices to find out about suitable charities. If you were going to do good, you wanted to be sure that everyone knew about it.
Joe was so pleased with all of this that he went off to order two dozen carnations for Mel. He asked the florist to deliver them in a pink and gilt basket, since it would not do for anyone at St Luke’s to think that Councillor Anderson (almost certain to be the Right Honourable Joseph Anderson very soon) was a penny-pincher.
In the tradition of all good newspapermen Harry was starting his research into Simone Marriot’s family by checking archived newspapers. You did not neglect your own terrain, and providing you took a balanced view newspapers were a primary source for research, although you had to read and analyse both ends of the spectrum. You had to get at the facts. This last sounded like a nineteen-fifties American police series. I’m here to get the facts, just gimme the facts, Mack. Hero lights up a Sobranie, tips hat to rakish angle, turns up raincoat collar, and adopts a macho pose under a handily positioned street light. Harry Lime in
The Third Man
, or Bogart’s Philip Marlowe, sneeringly cynical. Great role models, both.
Giving Harry this commission, Markovitch, wily old wordsmith, had used an unexpectedly picturesque phrase—pathways into the past. It conjured up the dusty purlieus of ancient files and curling-edged letters and mediums’ trances, and Harry suspected Markovitch had employed it calculatedly to snare his interest. He ate a makeshift meal in the small kitchen of his flat, dumped the dishes in the sink, and in the absence of the Sobranie and the hat poured himself a large whisky and sat down at the computer. The portals of the internet might not be as romantic as fading photographs and sepia-inked diaries but they opened up the past a whole lot faster. You see, Mr Wells, after all we discovered a time machine to take us back. But we call it an internet search engine. What do you think of that for a good science-fiction title, H.G., or can I call you Herbert?
He found the announcement of the twins’ birth easily enough. Just over twenty-two years ago it had been, and Simone’s twin was called Sonia—the name had a faintly foreign, slightly exotic ring to it which Harry rather liked. The journalists of the day had pounced on the story, of course, and splattered it across their pages. ‘
Conjoined twins born in North London…
’ ‘
Wife of by
-
election’s front runner gives birth to Siamese twins…
’
But the story had got going in earnest when Joseph Anderson had unexpectedly adopted religious scruples over the operation to separate them. Harry, reading the articles critically, had no idea if this was genuine or assumed. Given Anderson’s political aspirations, which were mentioned several times, it might very well be a convenient pose. He tried to think if the anti-sleaze movement had got going at the start of the 1980s, and thought it had.
But whatever Anderson’s motives, the whole thing had made for terrific copy. Part sob-story, part ethical dilemma, part ordinary people propelled into an extraordinary situation. Markovitch, vampiric old hack, must have revelled in it at the time. Hell, it sounded as if most of Fleet Street had revelled in it.
‘
Siamese twins’ dad says, “When God deals a bad hand we have to grin and bear it,”
’ That was the
Mirror
, of course. The
Telegraph
had assembled a few comments from Church leaders, with one or two bishops rather guardedly observing that there was a duty to the newborn and medical science was a wonderful thing, and Rome coming down strong on the side of the unborn, and pointing out that the sanctity of life must always be paramount.
The Times
, with the dignity it usually considered incumbent on its position, had run articles written by a few eminent gynaecologists, most of whom had taken up several column inches to describe the exact process of the surgical procedure that was envisaged for the Anderson twins, and also several other surgical procedures that, as far as Harry could make out, had bugger-all to do with the case in question.
The
Mail
had been quite sympathetic to Joseph Anderson, (‘
The agony of a father…
’) but the
Sun
had been distinctly derisory, and had managed to get hold of a particularly bad photograph of Anderson looking predatory at a ballot-box. The sub-editor had positioned it alongside a very smudgy shot of two small babies who might have been anyone, and who were probably not the Anderson twins at all. To round things off there were several snide observations about innocent and defenceless newborn creatures, and even a quotation from Pope about the trusting lamb licking the hand that was raised to shed its blood, although God alone knew where the
Sun
had got hold of a Pope quotation.
This was all so far, so good. Harry saved several of the articles for future reference, typed up some notes for possible sidelines for inquiry, and jotted down likely-sounding sentences as they occurred to him. After an hour of this he leaned back, massaging his neck to ease muscles cramped from bending over the keyboard for so long.
He would have to pursue the twins’ lives as far as he could, of course. He would have to find out about the operation to separate them. Simone appeared to have survived all right, but how about the other one? Sonia. Who is Sonia, what is she, that all our swains commend her? More to the point, where is Sonia? Harry scribbled a note to check the marriage and death columns for her name. He would have to look up details about the father’s political career as well. He had never heard of Joseph Anderson, but that did not mean Anderson had not finally got himself into Westminster, and walked the corridors of power at some stage.
And what about the personalities of the twins themselves? Angelica had said Simone was sometimes fey, and that she had been strongly attracted to the Bloomsbury house, to the extent of saying they must have it. Why? What was there about the house that had so deeply affected her? Harry had a deep suspicion of females with a ‘must-have’ streak. They were usually enormously untrustworthy and monumentally self-centred, as well as being acquisitive to their eyelashes. Amanda had been a must-have in its highest form and because of it Harry had had to sell the London flat so that he could give her the half-share that Amanda said she must have, it was nothing less than her right and her solicitor had confirmed this. Harry’s solicitor had unwillingly confirmed it as well. After the building society had taken its cut of the sale proceeds, and after the lawyers had taken theirs, and after erratic house prices had diminished the property’s value by about ten per cent, Harry had been left with a measly thousand quid. Not enough to buy so much as a broom cupboard. So there you go, life’s a bitch, especially if you’ve married one.
He poured himself another whisky, rummaged the bookshelves for a London telephone directory and the address of HM Land Registry office, and sat down to compose a letter of inquiry about the Bloomsbury house’s previous owners.
Even with the cards stacked so strongly against them, even lying inside the incubator, Simone and Sonia were beautiful children; Mel saw that at once.
Little russet-brown caps of silky hair. Small, sweet faces, with mischievous eyes. Like something out of a nineteenth-century fairytale, or that scene in
Midsummer Night’s Dream
about the bank with the nodding violet and the sweet musk-roses. She would see if Joe would agree to adding Violet and Rose as second names. There had been something of a fashion for flower names around the turn of the century; Mel had had a great-aunt, born around that time, who had been called Lily. And in one of the books she had been reading there had been a brief mention of conjoined twins born to someone called Charlotte Quinton a few minutes after midnight on 1st January 1900. The timing and the date—the very start of a new century—was probably the only reason they were mentioned and there was nothing about the twins’ lives, or whether they had ever been separated. But they had been christened Viola and Sorrel, which Mel found rather attractive. Viola and Sorrel Quinton. Had their mother thought they resembled mischievous, curled-up flowers as well?
Charlotte Quinton’s diaries:
2nd January 1900: 10.00 p.m.
The beating of the invisible heart that I thought I had heard was inside my own head, of course. Panic, sending the blood thudding through my body, because despite what I said earlier, I really was frightened about seeing the twins.
We went through horrid, soulless passages, and Dr Austin’s nurse, who was pushing the chair, tried to make bright conversation along the way, the silly creature. Or was she really so silly? Difficult to tell, because the pounding was all around me, and there was a huge suffocating weight pressing down on my head. A fine thing if I were to faint just as we reached the babies’ room. Edward’s mother would never let that one go unremarked! Poor Charlotte, no stamina. Always has to make a scene. No breeding, you can always tell.
So I managed not to faint, purely so as not to give the old bat the satisfaction.
But the hovering darkness was with me as we went along, like a huge black bird, beating its wings relentlessly and uselessly against prison bars. The wheels of the chair screeched and scratched on the stone floors, like the sound made when somebody draws a nail across a slaty surface, and the wheels sang a sinister little song to themselves like train wheels.
You’ll
-
never
-
cope… You’ll
-
never
-
cope…
Yes-I-will… Yes-I-will…
And then we were there, entering a room painted an unpleasant dark green, and the nurse was pushing the chair across to a wide hospital crib in one corner, and I wanted to get out of the shameful chair and walk across the room to meet the twins properly, but I was still sore and aching from the birth, and light-headed from the chloroform.
The light from one of the narrow windows slanted across the crib and their eyes were shut tight against the unfriendly world, and if Dr Austin had not explained to me that they were joined together at the waist, I would just have thought they were lying cuddled close together. The one nearer the window had turned her little face to the sunshine as if she was absorbing its golden warmth through her skin, and I wanted to snatch her and her sister up, and take them out of this dour place where people thought it acceptable to put babies in depressing dark green rooms.
It was suddenly enormously important to give them names, to make them into real people. I looked at them for a long time, seeing all over again how they were clinging to one another, almost as if they were trying to draw strength from one another.
Clinging. I remembered that I had wanted to give them fashionable flower names.
‘Ivy,’ I said aloud, trying it out. ‘Ivy and Violet.’ And then I looked back at the small shut faces and knew those names were quite wrong. Ivy was a creeping, clinging plant; Violet was a shy, shrinking name. The twins would need all the strength they could get: vital not to give them creeping, cowering names. So I said, ‘No, not Violet—Viola.’ Viola had been one of Shakespeare’s nicest heroines: she had been a twin as well, and she had triumphed over all kinds of adversities.
‘Viola. That’s very pretty.’ The nurse bent over to write it on a little tag around one of the tiny soft wrists. ‘And Ivy for the other one, did you say?’
‘No. Ivy’s a parasite. Sorrel,’ I said, without realizing I had been going to say it. Wood sorrel had grown in the garden at home when I was small; it was pretty and hardy, and even remembering the name made me think of autumn woods and the purple mists of harebells.
‘Viola and Sorrel.’
‘Yes.’
Viola and Sorrel.
They left me alone for a very long time with the twins. As long as you wish, they said. We shan’t disturb you. Are you comfortable in that chair? There’s a cushion here if you want it.
So I stayed in the room on my own with the babies, and when the nurse had gone I reached both hands down inside the cradle, one hand to each of them, and they each curled a tiny hand around one of my fingers in the way babies always do, only this was different, because they were mine. I stayed with them for a long, long time.