Incarnate (39 page)

Freda was growing less sure that she did, unless she was supposed to comfort Doreen’s friend somehow. Surely Sage could do that best, and she told herself he would. She sipped her tea and felt peaceful. There seemed to be no further need to talk.

Sage carried her overnight bag to her room and opened the door for her. She found herself wondering what she would do if he came in with her and closed the door behind him, and she snatched the bag, blushing furiously. “Thanks,” she muttered as she closed him out, and waited until she heard his descending footsteps. To think she’d meant to ask him if his name was really Sage! She could only scoff at herself and her jumble of feelings.

She dropped her bag beside the dressing table and lay down on the bed. No wonder she was sleepy after so long on the train. She stared up at the crucifix above the bed, then closed her eyes. The miniature figure had seemed to lean forward as if preparing to jump off the cross and onto her pillow. She slept and dreamed she was in prison, endless pale green corridors of cells whose windows looked out on nothing whatsoever. She was glad when a knock at the door woke her up.

It was Sage. “I am to tell you that dinner is almost served,” he said. She couldn’t help smiling, though she didn’t think he meant to parody a butler. She washed and changed, she propped the tilting mirror while she inspected herself in her black dress, and then started as she stepped onto the landing, for Sage was waiting for her at the head of the stairs. Didn’t he think she could find her own way down? All the same, she felt elegant when he took her arm to escort her to dinner. A twinge of delicious apprehension made her scoff at herself as he ushered her down past his room.

Doreen wheeled in the trolley as soon as they were seated. She must be expecting her friend Rosie, for there was far too much on the trolley for three. Either Doreen’s cooking had improved with her state of mind or Sage was helping her, though there was nothing elaborate: a large boiled ham, baked potatoes, piles of steaming vegetables in serving dishes. Sage carved the ham and served from the dishes, and it wasn’t until he passed her the plate that Freda realized the largest helping was for her. “I don’t think I can eat all that,” she protested. “What do you think I am, the ever-open door?”

“I thought you to have an appetite.”

She remembered the enormous meal she had consumed here after Christmas. All at once the sight of the heaped plate made her feel ravenous. She wolfed down the food while the others ate and smiled at her, Sage encouragingly, Doreen with a kind of awe. She was astonished to find when she’d cleaned her plate that she was still hungry. .“Have as much as you need, finish it if you like,” Doreen said, and seemed nervous.

Freda had another helping and was hardly aware of eating as she listened to Sage. The sound of footsteps in the street brought her back to herself. She couldn’t remember what he had been saying, she knew only that it had made her feel peaceful. The footsteps outside seemed an intrusion from another world, and so did the knock at the front door.

“Freda, this is Rosie Scatchard.” Doreen stood aside so that her friend, who looked daunted, had to step into the room. The woman had large, very dark eyes in a face that was smiling bravely against its lines, and seemed in awe both of Freda and Sage, of Freda perhaps because she barely came up to her shoulder. Freda noticed that Rosie Scatchard had forgotten to varnish her left little fingernail, flesh-colored when the others were silver, and the sight made her feel protective. She recognized Rosie as the woman behind the sandwich table at the Spiritualist jumble sale. “Thank you for letting me come,” Rosie said.

“It wasn’t up to me.” Freda felt ashamed at once, though she hadn’t meant that as a rebuff. “This is Sage,” she said, to indicate to Rosie where she ought to direct her hopes.

“Oh …” Rosie grew tongue-tied as he shook her hand lightly. Freda sank back into her chair, wondering how she could have eaten so much and why. She closed her eyes as Sage jerked the cords to turn out all the wall lamps except one. He sat beside her, while Rosie seated herself nervously between her and Doreen. She wished the room weren’t so stuffy with its floor-length curtains and the trapped heat of the gas fire, but she could hardly ask for a window to be opened just now. She kept her eyes closed and listened to the clock, straining her ears to make sure she didn’t lose it, and then she was in the forest where the leaves were all the same. She was running through the aisles of trees, running from whoever was there in the forest with her, but the worst thing was that the forest didn’t go on forever. There seemed to be nothing but colorlessness beyond the trees between which she was fleeing, an absence that terrified her so much she couldn’t look. Wouldn’t any kind of companionship be preferable to this? The thought of choosing terrified her too, for once the choice was made or even thought of it would be irrevocable. The forest was growing swiftly dark, which only threw the nothingness beyond it into sharper relief. There was nowhere to run as the birds started singing, and she cried out as a hand grasped hers. It was Sage. “It’s over now,” he said.

Did he mean the séance, if there had been one, or her dream? Presumably the séance, for there was no sign of Rosie Scatchard. Freda felt too enervated to awaken, and could only blink at the room. “Rosie asked me to thank you,” Doreen said. “You can imagine how grateful she is.”

She must be talking to Sage; she could hardly be thanking Freda for falling asleep. Freda felt distant and attenuated and, incredibly, hollow. She stumbled to her feet and clung to her chair. “I think I’ll go to bed, if you don’t mind. Sorry I was rude.”

“Allow me.” Sage held her elbow lightly, as if she weighed as little as she felt she did. Doreen was frowning, and seemed not to understand what Freda had said. She came to herself just as Freda reached the door. “Rosie’s staying,” she said. “She’s on your floor, in case you hear her and wonder who it is. She doesn’t want to go home, not now.”

Perhaps the séance had aggravated Rosie’s nervousness. Freda hoped she wouldn’t come to her room in the night for reassurance. Freda labored up the stairs and staggered into her room, and said “Good night” firmly as Sage held her arm across the threshold. She sat on her bed for quite a time before she felt able to stand up and undress.

She lay in the cool dark where the crucifix hovered above her head, and heard Rosie mumbling across the landing. When she strained her ears she thought she heard a male voice answering. If Sage was comforting her that was fine, so long as he stayed away from Freda’s room while she felt like this.

She woke from dreaming that Pentonville had invaded the house somehow and made it endless. She felt walled in by the dark until she switched on the bedside lamp. She didn’t want to risk sleep again until she’d had a talk— perhaps she would feel less on edge if she found out what had happened at the séance while she had been asleep. Doreen ought still to be awake. Freda stood up gingerly and put on her coat over her nightdress, then she ventured onto the landing.

She mustn’t be fully awake. For a moment she had the impression that the stairs went up as well as down. She crept downstairs, clinging to the banister, and halted at Sage’s floor. Yes, it was his voice she could hear, singing in no language, she felt instinctively. Presumably it was a way of meditating. The song was so convoluted it seemed to have no shape; it made her feel unstable, all the more so because somehow she couldn’t judge its distance: it didn’t sound close, it sounded distant but very large. She opened her eyes when her foot touched a floor that wasn’t stair, and then she began to shiver. She wasn’t on the ground floor.

It was tiredness that was making her shiver and imagine things, not his voice. Somehow, with her eyes closed, she had only thought she had gone down a flight of stairs. She was still on his floor, his voice was still as close, and she didn’t even glance at the landing or the doors as she went down, opening her eyes so wide that they stung. Here was the ground floor where it ought to be, though Sage’s voice above her seemed no more distant, seemed to be permeating the house. At least she knew where he was, and so she didn’t knock before easing open the door to Doreen’s quarters.

The little sitting room was dark. Doreen must be in bed after all, for Freda heard her sighing. Surely that meant she wasn’t asleep. Freda made her way round Harry’s sagging chair, supported herself just in time on its creaking back to prevent herself from knocking over the chessboard. She seemed to know this room more vividly than she knew her flat in Blackpool. She tapped softly with her fingernails on Doreen’s bedroom door, then inched it open.

At first she could see only the pillow, spotlighted by a streetlamp through a gap between the curtains. Doreen’s face was there, upturned so that Freda saw her sighing mouth begin to gasp, and so was something else, something soft and pink. Why was the ridge of bedclothes that hid Doreen’s body so large? Why was it heaving? Freda dismissed the possibility that occurred to her, because Sage was upstairs, and stepped forward. The next moment Doreen saw her, and what stopped Freda as though a hammer had struck her on the temple was Doreen’s face.

If anything could have started Freda from her paralysis, it would have been the defiance in Doreen’s eyes. Freda wanted to turn and run upstairs, take her blushing burning face away, for Sage wasn’t in his room after all—it must have been a record or a tape that she’d heard in there. The man in bed with Freda was lifting his soft pink head from the pillow, the bedclothes were slipping off his naked back, and she couldn’t flee for the thought of seeing what Sage looked like without his clothes. Surely he ought to look paler than this, surely his head ought to. The hairless pink head bobbed up through the wedge of light, it turned on its neck that was soft as a baby’s, and he smiled at Freda. She didn’t know if it was his smile that made her want to scream or prevented her from screaming.

She knocked over the chessboard as she stumbled toward the hall. She didn’t know how many floors she climbed past, but there were far too many stairs. She had a nightmare fear that if she didn’t find her floor she would simply keep on climbing. Her legs were shaking violently by the time she reached her room.

She bolted the door behind her for the first time in her life and felt as if she’d walked into a cell. Sage’s voice came seeping up from his room, reaching sinuously for her. He had been in his room ever since she had left hers. The man in Doreen’s bedroom, the man who Freda knew suddenly had been there ever since the night of the first séance, the man with the pink newborn face that had given her a smile she couldn’t mistake, was Harry.

39

H
ALF AN HOUR
into the examination, one of the industrialists raised his head and glared at Stuart as if the questions were .Stuart’s revenge on the world for all the examinations he had had to sit. He looked ready to stand up and tell Stuart the examination was useless, they were paying far too much money to be told what they already knew, he was going to make sure the media heard about it and exposed it for what it was. Though Stuart didn’t believe any of this, he couldn’t help hoping wickedly that the industrialist would make a scene. It would be the first time anyone had.

The industrialist was glaring at the problem, not at him. His eyes didn’t move as Stuart strolled down the long green room under the fluorescent tubes and tried to make sure his shadow didn’t fall on anyone’s desk. Now Stuart knew why proctors paced: not so much to make sure that nobody cheated as because there were few more tedious ways of wasting time than sitting at the proctor’s desk and staring at the rows of bent heads, staring until you might have thought you were in a wig factory instead of looking at people.

More of the industrialists were frowning or muttering or scratching their heads. Stuart guessed they’d reached one of the logical problems that didn’t make sense, hidden among the problems that were capable of resolution. If anyone protested he knew what to say: science was a matter of discovering and showing, not assuming; what people called common sense was liable to point in opposite directions for different people; the examinees might think they knew how they would respond to the paper in front of them, but they couldn’t without going through the experience. Some of them were crossing out the question to show they had deduced it was fake, while their neighbors glanced resentfully at them, unconvinced. At least they might be learning something about themselves.

This afternoon would see the sneakiest routine of all, the slide show. He’d tell them they were about to undergo an experiment in perception, he’d flash up a slide and tell them they hadn’t seen what in fact they had, he’d flash the slide again and most of them would see what he had told them they had seen. Sometimes arguments broke out when eventually he held the slide on the screen for as long as it took them to see what was there. He knew how they felt, for the first time he’d shown the slides he had almost seen what the subjects believed they had seen. Nothing was more infectious than belief. Why, the only nightmare that had ever disturbed him he’d experienced while Guilda Kent was pursuing her research here on prophetic dreaming.

There it was: he was back to that again. He went to his desk at the front of the room and dumped himself in his chair. Outside the window, beneath the white sky, the snow had retreated to the tops of hills and into the odd copse. He stared out and wondered what else he could do to find Guilda.

Maybe she had left because she’d wanted to work with ordinary people, but that wasn’t the whole truth. She’d left because she’d been disturbed by her research. After the experiment had been terminated so abruptly, she’d wandered the corridors as if she were looking for something, she’d hardly spoken to anyone for weeks, and then, one day she had resigned and he had never had the chance to look at the notebook in which she had been scribbling observations ever since the experiment began. He’d had the impression that she was uneasy in this building, though he had never understood why. He rather thought she had resigned in the hope that she would find the problems of ordinary people less disturbing. Of course he hadn’t told Martin Wallace any of this—thank whoever made things happen that he read
Private Eye
and had recognized Wallace in time—but Wallace’s visit had made him feel even more responsible than he’d grown to feel over the years.