Thorn (10 page)

There was not a great deal for him to do. The bodies had been washed and their hair combed, and they had been dressed in clean night-clothes, which was apparently how the family wished them to be buried. Huxtable's were used to all kinds of different instructions. People wanted their dead buried with guitars or in leather motorbike jackets, or with a tape or a record of favourite music, or with photographs of children or parents. Old Huxtable always complied short of the downright bizarre. It was an echo, he said, of the ancient Egyptians and he told his staff how the Pharaohs had buried food and drink and familiar objects with them, for comfort on the journey after death – even servants as well. This had been interesting, although it had to be said that you could count on one hand the number of people in Hampstead who held by the burial customs of ancient Egypt, never mind wanting to share a grave with the au pair or the cleaning lady!

Huxtable's had taken measurements yesterday, and the assistant had brought the coffins along now, together with two of the collapsible biers. There was a white linen cloth to go over each, and a small flower display – white carnations and a bit of fern – to stand between the two. All very tasteful and discreet. No candles, of course – Mrs Caudle did not want any Romish observations, which the assistant thought rather a pity; a couple of nice corpse candles gave a properly sombre note to a death chamber. But people had no sense of occasion these days.

He got on with transferring the two bodies into the lined coffins. The man had had a massive coronary, seemingly. He looked a prime candidate for one: well fleshed, and a bit sleek. Too much rich food and drink. Neither of the bodies' jaws had dropped, in fact the man's had been set fast with the rigor. Very good.

There was an odd feeling in this room, almost a feeling of somebody watching him. Peculiar that. You would have thought that by now he'd be used to being alone with the dead, but he found himself continually looking over his shoulder, as if he was no more than a novice, learning his trade, superstitious about the poor empty creatures under his hands. But there was something nasty about this house – something eerie, yes that was the word! An eerie place. He would be very glad indeed to be finished and leave.

There was to be no embalming, which Huxtable's would have preferred, with the bodies remaining in the house, especially since the house was so extremely well heated. People wouldn't believe how easy and hygienic embalming was these days; a simple matter of eliminating the body's contents and injecting a preservative. Still, the instructions here had been specific and would be complied with.

There was no rigor at all in the female, which was probably due to the warmth. The assistant made himself a mental note to turn the central heating radiator off in this room before he left, and open the window. Really it was just as well that the service was being held tomorrow. Good-looking woman, she'd been, if you liked them pale and fair, which the undertaker did not. Perforated stomach ulcer, so the certificate said.

In accordance with his own small private ritual – he was a rather devout man in a quiet way – he murmured a brief prayer over the two bodies.

And then he screwed down the coffin lids.

I
mogen thought it was going to get pretty boring inside Briar House. There was not very much to do during the day and there was even less in the evenings.

Nobody had actually come out and said so, but it was perfectly obvious that the aunts and everyone else wanted her out of the way for a while. It was possible that this was because of her parents' death, but Imogen did not think it was very likely. Everyone seemed more concerned with Imogen herself than with her father's heart attack or her mother's perforated ulcer. This seemed extremely odd. And had Eloise really suffered from an ulcer for several years and not said anything? There's something here I don't understand, thought Imogen hazily. There's something they're not telling me. Aunt Rosa had referred to nervous strain which had not made very much sense; Aunt Dilys, weeping copiously, had talked about strain and exhaustion, which had made even less. But it made sense if they all thought she was responsible for what had happened at Edmund's funeral. This was an appalling idea, but it had to be faced.

Did the family really think that? Did they believe that she had crept into the mortuary or the Chapel of Rest and opened Edmund's coffin and taken his head and brought it back to the house? How did you carry a human head, for heaven's sake? In a hatbox, like that old film where the murderer kept his victim's head on top of the wardrobe? In a Sainsbury's carrier bag? But a person who would do something like that would be mad.

The word exploded in her mind, sending up clouds of panic, like a depth charge, because that was it,
of course
that was it. They did think she was mad. That was what this was all about. They all thought it: Great-Aunt Flora, Dilys and Rosa, and nice, dizzy Juliette. That was why nobody seemed to be grieving about Royston and Eloise. Had the dark-haired young man at the funeral thought she was mad as well? His face was blurry now – almost everything was blurry now – but he had looked at her in a way she did not think anyone had ever looked at her before. As if she was grown-up. As if she was ordinary and did all the things that ordinary people did. Imogen would most likely never see him again in her life, but it was somehow important that he did not think she had done something so – well, so
grisly.
It was very important indeed that he did not think she was mad.

The regime in Briar House was rather casual. It appeared that no one minded if you missed the occasional meal, providing you did not make a habit of it and providing you were not in Briar House for any kind of eating disorder like anorexia. There was a small kitchen on the floor below Imogen's where tea and coffee could be made, or even scrambled eggs or soup, although you had to ask one of the nurses to bring things in for you and it made problems if you had no actual cash, which Imogen had not. The kitchen was shared between several rooms, and Imogen thought, half enviously, half regretfully, that it was the kind of set-up you had in university halls of residence. It was a sad irony that when she should finally experience the kind of university half-liberation she had wanted and her school had wanted for her, it had to be in a place like this.

The matron was a well-built lady of uncertain age and, from the look of her mouth, even more uncertain temper, and Imogen had disliked her on sight. People talked about the eyes being the windows of the soul, but mouths were a much better indication and Matron Porter's mouth was not wide and generous to match her build, it was small and pursed like an old-fashioned drawstring bag. She doesn't much like me, Imogen had thought on the first day, vaguely listening as Aunt Thalia explained about the sedatives prescribed by Dr Shilling. ‘Diazepam, Matron. Quite a mild dosage, I understand. But you'll see she takes it?'

‘Certainly.'

Imogen thought that Matron looked the kind of person who would enjoy shovelling repellent medicine down people.

She was given a room of her own, which was a relief because she had been visualising grim dormitories with iron beds and lockers. In the really bad moments she had been visualising iron bars at the windows. But she was shown to a room on the second floor. It was not very big, but it was clean and there were chintz curtains and a matching bedspread, and a small dressing table and wardrobe. The room was by itself at the end of a corridor, at the foot of a narrow stair that went up into the attics.

There was still a dreamlike quality to everything. Imogen felt as if her mind was wrapped in cotton wool. She tried to think about her parents and how it was appalling that they were both so abruptly dead but there was only a vague dull sense of loss. This was terrible. It was terrible to feel so little about your mother and father. She felt detached and slightly light-headed, as if her mind had been dislocated and as if it needed someone to tweak it back into place. Her sight did not seem to be quite synchronised with the rest of her, either. As if she was seeing everything through water, or a fraction of a second after it happened. She thought this might be the sedatives, and determined that as soon as she was fairly sure that Matron was not checking on her, she would stop taking them. There was a washbasin in her room, and it would be easy to tip the tablets down the plughole and wash them away with the taps turned on full.

On her second night in Briar House, Imogen met Quincy.

It was a curious meeting. Imogen had been taking a shower before going to bed, and she was crossing the landing back to her room, wearing only her dressing gown, when a stealthy movement on the attic stair caught her attention. She stopped, and looked up the shadowy stairway apprehensively. There was a moment of silence, and then a quick indrawn breath and a hesitant step. The slight figure of a girl of around Imogen's own age, or perhaps a little younger – say fifteen or sixteen – came down the stairs. She had short, ragged hair and a triangular face like a cat's, and wide, afraid eyes. She stood on the bottom step, staring fearfully at Imogen.

Imogen smiled at her and said, ‘Did I wake you? I'm sorry if I did but I didn't know anyone was up there. I was just going to bed. That's my room over there.'

There was a moment of silence, and then the girl said, ‘Yes, I know. Only I thought . . .'

‘Yes?'

‘I thought you might be Matron.' She stopped and made an urchin gesture of rubbing her nose with the back of her hand and sniffing back tears, or fear. ‘She don't – doesn't like me to sit on the stairs. She says it's snooping. But it isn't snooping; I like to watch people.'

‘Well, I'm not Matron. I'm just staying here for a while. And I quite like watching people as well. Do you,' Imogen paused, and then went on, ‘do you live here?' There was no way of knowing if the urchin girl was a patient or one of the assistants. She looks a bit fey, thought Imogen. As if she might sometimes see things that other people don't. She said carefully, ‘I'm sorry, I don't know your name.'

‘Quincy.' It was as odd as everything else about her. Imogen wondered if it was some kind of nickname.

She said, ‘I'm Imogen Ingram.'

‘I know who you are, I saw you arrive yesterday.' Quincy spoke with a London accent; not quite Cockney and certainly not what was these days called Estuary English. It might be one of the older strains of Cockney, one of the vanishing strains.

‘I made a drawing of you,' said Quincy, suddenly. ‘Last night.'

‘Did you really? That's rather flattering. Will you show it to me sometime?' It was not quite like talking to a child, but it was not quite like talking to an adult either. Imogen was curious to know what kind of drawings this odd little creature could produce.

‘Now? You could come now while everyone's in bed.' It was as if having confided about the drawing, Quincy had decided to trust Imogen a bit further.

Imogen said, ‘Yes, all right.'

The attic room was stuffy and very spartan so that Imogen wondered if Quincy was a helper here after all. But the drawings were astonishing; Imogen had never seen anything quite like them. She really does see things other people don't, she thought, studying them with fascination. She's romanticised me a good deal – all that hair. And my face isn't that exaggerated heart shape either. It's a pretty creepy drawing when you study it a bit closer: the way the curtains are drawn back so that the folds shape into a leery face, and the way the curtain tassels look like a clutching hand with talons . . . But she's amazingly talented. Imogen looked up to meet the frightened-cat eyes. ‘Quincy, these are terrific. Have you been to an art school or anything?'

‘Oh no.'

‘Well, you should,' said Imogen. ‘You ought to have proper training so that you could make a real career. Hasn't anyone ever suggested it? Your parents or your school or anyone?'

‘I haven't got any parents. I didn't go to school much. Dr Sterne said I should go to an art school, though. When he came to – the place I lived before.'

‘Where was that? Where did you live?' Imogen had asked the question without any intention other than that of ordinary friendliness, but to her horror Quincy began to tremble, wrapping her arms about her thin body and rocking to and fro. She's not aware of me any more, thought Imogen, or of this mean little room.

But after a moment Quincy's eyes focused on Imogen again. ‘Thornacre,' she said. ‘I lived in Thornacre.'

Freda Porter had not wanted to take Quincy into Briar House, but Dr Sterne had been persuasive, and Dr Sterne at his most persuasive was hard to resist.

Quincy was one of his protégées; she was one of the poor souls he had found in Thornacre and brought out with him. He was still uncovering her story, he explained, although this was proving to be a long and difficult task. But it seemed clear that there had been abuse from childhood on, and they were afraid there might have been some ill-treatment in Thornacre as well. She had been there for two or three years, they thought.

‘A very pitiful case indeed,' said he, fixing Freda with his remarkable eyes, so that Freda felt really quite peculiar for a minute.

‘And what exactly is the problem, Dr Sterne?'

‘I'm not sure yet. She's withdrawn from the world a good deal,' said Leo. ‘But not quite in the usual way of clinical depression.'

‘Ah. Indeed.'

‘She seems to have entered some kind of strange twilight world of her own,' said Leo. ‘I don't know yet whether it's any safer or kinder to her than the real world's been, and I don't know what nightmares she's lived through either.'

‘Well, I am sure you will find out if anyone can, Dr Sterne,' said Freda comfortably. Quite stimulating it was to hear Dr Sterne talk like this. ‘A cup of coffee, Doctor?' It was all set ready, with Freda's best flowered cups and saucers.