The Best New Horror 2 (56 page)

Luckily Mrs Porter had a heavy tread and a habit of calling before she reached the door. Susan found a place to hide behind one of the patterned panels; there was a recess in the wall, an old doorway. When Mrs Porter had seen the room empty and gone away Susan could slip out into the corridor, run down a little back stair to the courtyard and take her place beside Jamie and Olive. She sat in the shadows, they smiled and yawned in the sunshine. Mrs Porter, bustling in to say that the child was nowhere to be found, stared as if she had seen a ghost.

There was no one else who mattered at the Pensione Guardi: two families of Germans, a group of art students from the Slade School, jolly Bohemian girls who were suspected of smoking cigarettes. Then there was the American with whom Jamie had a nodding acquaintance from Cambridge. Hadley, he said, was a bit of a dry stick who studied old buildings, wrote books about them in fact. No need to worry about old Hadley knowing anything; he lived in a dream. Susan looked enviously at Hadley, who was neither Bohemian nor jolly, lounging in the shade of the oleanders. She had written, on a postcard to herself,
Sometimes I think I am living in a nightmare
.

During the endless summer they went many times to the Piazza San Marco. They glimpsed Hadley in the distance gazing at the empty space left by the Campanile, which had fallen down something over a year ago. A golden age had ended for Susan at about this time: the London house was decorated for the coronation but Father—what else could she call him—went to stay at his club. Her mother wept in a darkened room. Mrs Field was not at home to anyone ever again except the doctor and nurse who bore her away, by night, in a closed carriage.

Now, inside the glittering cavern of the cathedral, they all hid from their neighbours, the Farquhars, and some acquaintances of Olive’s
family, the Misses Black. The pillars behind which they loitered until the coast was clear were of porphry, writhing upwards like the serpents that crushed Laocoön.

Once, in a smaller church, they simply hid Susan, the living proof that things were not as they should be. The honeymooners presented themselves (Olive all softness and blushes, Jamie with his shoulders back) to disarm the Misses Black, while Susan slipped into a side chapel. It was here that she recognized the presence for the first time.

She crouched down low in one of the little black chairs for worshippers. There were a few candles, a picture of the saint with the Virgin and angels. Candlelight penetrated the small glass box on the altar which contained a relic. A splinter of black bone lay on folds of apricot satin embroidered in turquoise and gold. The colour brought back associations which were so warm and vivid that Susan caught her breath with longing. Why, it was her dream again and it was the tapestry in the writing room.

The dream was not quite a dream of home. Better than that. She was driven in a closed carriage up to a pillared portico. Golden light streamed out and a low, sweet voice cried: “
Cara mia
. . .” She ran up the steps into the lady’s arms, was half-smothered in soft folds of cloth of exactly this colour. Then there were crowds of people, the hallway was full and someone else said: “We are so awfully pleased to see you!” She knew that she was being rewarded for some heroic deed; she had been a great help to some absolutely splendid person who was under a cloud.

In the writing room again—she had been impatient to get back to the Pensione—she saw that the lady with the mask wore a cloak of the same shade. It came to her that the scene showed the beginning of some adventure, not the end. The lady with the mask was drawing her companion out of the gondola towards the door of the palazzo. The young girl hung back a little; the maskers on the bridge, Harlequin, Columbine and one with a death’s head, seemed to say: “Oh go along, silly goose! Why are you so shy?”

On summer afternoons, during the long siesta, Susan left her bedroom and stole through the empty corridors to the writing room. She lay down on a striped sofa near the windows. Currents of warm air curled through the room lifting the upper edges of the tapestry panels and tinkling the lusters upon the chandelier. Once there was a soft sound as if one of these glass prisms had fallen down. She went to look and found a silver chain with a broken clasp lying in a heap against the stone wall. Next time it was a tiny bottle of Murano glass, white and gold, with a stopper in the shape of a fish. Days passed and she found, in more or less the same area of the room, a miniature fan with black lacquer sticks. Unfolded it was no bigger than the palm of her hand.

Susan could see that the tapestry panels hung upon the stone wall like banners, each with a rod and cord suspended from a hook. Higher than this, in the shadows, there were two outcrops in the stone in the shape of lions’ heads. During the siesta when no one was likely to come in she lay full length upon the carpet and saw that the lions’ heads, as she suspected, covered small dark openings in the wall. They were or had been ventilators. She blinked, as motes of dust fell from the tapestries. Right before her eyes a flying fish, a strip of paper with its ends ingeniously slotted together, came twirling down from the second lion’s head, over the picture.

She jumped up and ran to the last panel. The door in the recess was locked but she did not think it was bolted; it moved slightly when she turned the handle and pushed against it. Something rattled in the half darkness above her head. She bent the tapestry aside and the sleepy afternoon light showed her the large key, hanging on a hook against the wall.

About this time there was a harsh intrusion from the real world. A packet of letters from London was sent to James Field, Poste Restante, at the post office where he picked up his copies of
The Times
. Tremendously embarrassed he took Susan aside and sat with her on a stone bench. At a distance Olive stared out over the lagoon and unfurled her sunshade. One letter was for Susan herself, on stiff cream paper, written out in copperplate by a stranger, a lawyer’s clerk.

The letter must have been difficult to begin . . . what could be written at the top? The compromise was sensible: “To Susan—”, with a suggestively long dash. “In view of the findings of the court” it was preferable for all concerned that she should be known henceforth as Susan Anne Markham. She would be entered in August at Madame Kerr’s School in Berne, Switzerland, under this name and it would be as well if she learned to get along with the new arrangement.

The letter had the air of an act of God. She believed for a few seconds that it had been written by a lawyer or even a judge. The full horror of the thing was contained in the last lines of copperplate and in the familiar signature. “Your mother is still under the care of Dr Rassmussen at Malvern Spa. Yours truly, H.B.L. Field.”

It was the way that he signed his letters to tradespeople; the pain of his disavowal broke over her like a black wave; she trembled and clutched Jamie’s arm. Markham was their mother’s maiden name and they had distant Markham cousins.

“The Guvnor is going too far,” said Jamie wretchedly. “He can’t really make you do this, legally and all that.”

“He means,” said Susan, “to cast me off.”

James Field made an effort to explain the disaster that had struck their house but it was very nearly too late.

“You see, Tuppence,” he brought out, “the whole thing may not be true. Mother is very sick, the doctors say she has . . . she has lost her reason. Ladies sometimes accuse themselves of . . . of things that are not true.”

Susan felt herself blushing again. Mrs Porter had asked her if she knew the meaning of the word adultery.

“If Mummy is mad,” she said, “why is Father so dreadfully unkind to her . . . and to me?”

Jamie shook his head, it was becoming too difficult; Olive looked back impatiently. His father’s “unkindness”, his habitual and quite natural unfaithfulness, was at the root of the whole thing.

“He wanted to be free,” said Jamie. “Divorced.”

He was keeping an eye on a seller of knick-knacks with a ribboned tray who now approached Olive. Jamie bounced up and went to shoo the little bounder away. The happy pair stood close together under the sunshade; Susan saw them veiled in a sparkling mist that rose off the water. All around her floated the domes and colonnades of the unreal city. An elderly couple sat on the stone bench and fed the pigeons. She felt sure that they could not see her at all.

She drifted away to buy a postcard. As she put the letter into her purse she touched the little bottle of Murano glass, cold as the green depths of the sea. Out of the corner of her eye, there by the pillar topped with a crocodile, she caught a flash of apricot satin. She could not make out if they were both there, the young woman and the older one who wore a mask. When she turned her head they were gone. A gentleman bowed to her:

“Good morning, Miss Field!”

It was Hadley, the American. He saw her plain and she gave him a grateful smile.

Soon afterwards James and Olive went off for five days to do Padua. Kidson went with them, of course, and Susan was left in the capable hands of Mrs Porter. She gave no trouble and indeed the good woman seemed to have lost interest in her case. Susan appeared promptly at breakfast with her hair well brushed and it was accepted that she was going to “moon about the pension with a book”. Canon Porter went so far as to lend her his own copy of
Travels with a Donkey
.

Susan mooned about heavy with secret knowledge. She could not tell when it had come to her . . . it had not been a sudden revelation. She knew that she must take the risk of telling one of the adults. Her choice had narrowed: the jolly student girls had moved on to Florence. It was easy enough to dawdle over breakfast and then, when they were alone in the courtyard, to move to Hadley’s table.

Ashton Hadley did have some memory of a scandal in the London papers. It struck him as vaguely indecent that a schoolgirl should
accompany Field and his new bride. They were a handsome couple and the sensual aura that surrounded them impressed even Hadley, who liked to think of himself as world-weary. Now here was the young girl, irreproachably English, an adolescent Alice, and in her innocent way she was “making up” to him. Only seven years or so separated this half-formed creature from Olive, who glowed like Venus rising from the waves. He was overwhelmed by painful memories of a family of young American girls, his cousins, who had romped and flirted with arrogant assurance and then married other fellows.

He had no wish to be unkind; he agreed that he did have a moment to spare and that he knew about old buildings. His lips twitched a little as she swore him to secrecy; he began to be intrigued.

“There is a lady imprisoned,” said Susan, “in the old palazzo, behind the wall of the writing room.”

Hadley shut his Ruskin and stared. The girl was perfectly serious.

“Imprisoned?”

“She can’t get out. She is being kept there,” said Susan. “She sends . . . messages, through the wall.”

He began to see that the poor thing was mad. She was very pale and there were shadows under her blue eyes. Hadley was out of his depth, he wanted to hand her over as quickly as possible to a parent or guardian. He thought of the ghastly Mrs Porter and hesitated. It struck him for the first that Susan Field was unusually alone.

“I know it sounds pretty unbelievable,” she said, “but it is true.”

“My dear Miss Field . . .”

“Susan,” she said. “I can show you the evidence.”

Hadley made a despairing effort.

“Why would this person be . . . shut up?”

“I could think of reasons,” said Susan, “but that would be my imagination. I will show you . . .”

She reached into her white kid purse and carefully laid a number of small objects on the marble table top. Ashton Hadley was drawn to the glass bottle which was old and finely worked. He laughed uneasily and polished his eyeglasses.

“What’s that?”

She unfolded it gravely. Across the faded paper of the miniature fan a word was written in bronzed ink:
Soccorso
.

“Where did you get these things?”

“They came through the lions’ heads,” said Susan. “The ventilators high up on the wall of the writing room. They reach right back into some room on the other side of the wall. In the palazzo.”

She delved into her purse again and drew out three strips of paper with crossed ends slotted together. She held one of these constructions
high above her head and it floated, twirling gently, down to the stones of the courtyard.

“I call them flying fish,” she whispered.

Hadley retrieved the strip of paper; with a fold at the front and the crossed ends forming a tail it did have a fish shape. It was of blue-green writing paper, not new, and inscribed on the outer surface was another word in the same bronzed ink:
Hilfe
. The two remaining fish were just as laconic:
Help me
, said one,
Au secours
the other. He felt sure that the girl had written these words.

“Came through the lions’ heads?” he said quizzically.

“I swear it!”

She knotted her hands together.

“No,” said Hadley, as gently as he could. “Susan, it is all a nonsense. Even if someone were there . . .”

“Someone
is
there, Mr Hadley!”

“They may be confined for a good reason,” he said, “by relatives. Someone old perhaps, or unbalanced. What do you want me to do?”

He could see that what she wanted from him was some piece of knight-errantry.

“I would like to know who sent these things,” she said. “Perhaps we could help the lady.”

“Why must it be a lady?” demanded Hadley. “Why not children playing games?”

Why not, he thought, a certain young person trying to attract attention.

“Look here,” he said slyly, “I think you read rather a lot.”

“No,” she said, “not as much as people think.”

“You’ve read
Jane Eyre
I expect?”

“The mad wife in that book is frightening and horrid,” she said, blushing.

“And you think this . . . lady is not?” he said, smiling.

“You don’t believe me!”