Thorn (3 page)

Dan stared at it in horrified disbelief, his mind seething and his stomach churning. The head of Edmund Caudle, served up at his own funeral. It's the funeral baked meats, set before the king, he thought wildly. But the king's going to reject them; in fact from the look of him he's not only going to reject them, he's going to consign the cook to the dungeons and bellow ‘Off with her head' into the bargain – oh God, no, not that. It sounds as if somebody's being sick in the corner by the window; I'm not surprised. I hope whoever it is managed to miss the Sheraton desk.

People were getting to their feet, overturning chairs, and someone was screaming, and someone else was saying crossly, ‘For the love of God, one of you take Eloise out. And bring a bucket and mop.' Even at such a moment Dan registered that the Lily Maid was swooning decoratively, thus abrogating all responsibility for the terrible thing on the table. Dan finally managed to look at it again. It was still where Imogen had placed it. Well, did you expect it to move? demanded his inner voice. Maybe you thought the poor dead thing might start shuffling itself to the table's edge—If I start thinking like that I shall join whoever's throwing up on the Sheraton.

Two of the aunts – Dilys again and a thin, pointy-faced one with her – had gone to Thalia Caudle's side, but she shook them off. She was staring at Imogen, her eyes like black, fathomless pits, and the two aunts exchanged hesitant looks. Thalia looked like someone who had just taken a skewer in the heart. But she was still on her feet. Dan registered this with a refocusing of attention. This one's taking it on the chin.

A terrible silence had fallen, and every head had turned to Imogen. She was still standing by the table, her face white with shock, and even from where he stood Dan could see how her eyes had dilated with fear and bewilderment. Dan glanced quickly around the room. Everyone was looking at Imogen and on every face was shock. On most was accusation. They all think she's done it, thought Dan, and now his writer's mind was engaging top gear, recording everything. They think she somehow got into the mortuary or the Chapel of Rest and stole the head. They think she's mad – oh, hell's teeth, yes,
of course
! They think she's mad in the way those other women in the family were mad, the one who was supposed to have murdered her lover, and Lucienne, who chopped off her brother's prick. Only this one's chopped off her cousin's head. For God's sake, aren't any of them going to help her? He looked across to Royston Ingram; Ingram's face was an unhealthy grey colour and the flesh seemed to have fallen away from his bones. One hand was pressed to the left side of his chest, and he was breathing with a struggle. Heart, thought Dan, his own sinking. The princess raving mad, the queen retiring to bed with the vapours, and the king having a coronary.

It was then that he discovered in panic that he had crossed the room, and that he had actually picked up the domed lid. Its underside was faintly smeared with a thick, colourless dampness. Brain juices leaking? Don't be absurd, it's probably condensation from the baked ham! There was a teeth-wincing scrape of metal against metal as the lid clanged over the dreadful thing on the dish, and a sigh of relief went through the room.

Dan put one hand on Imogen's arm. ‘I think you should go and lie down, Miss Ingram,' he said, and then realised that he was about to look round and say, is there a doctor in the house? He heard with disbelief that he did say it, and almost at once a voice at his side responded. ‘I'll get John Shilling,' said the voice, ‘he took Eloise out.' And Dan recognised with thankfulness the same capable, slightly-sharp tones that had ordered somebody to fetch a bucket and mop.

Imogen looked at him with an unfocused stare. She was smaller than she had seemed from across the room and more fragile-boned. Her head was level with Dan's shoulder and she had to look up at him, and this added to her air of helpless vulnerability. She was like someone suddenly rocketed into a deep trance; it was impossible to know if she had heard him, or if she had heard anything, or even if she was aware of what was happening.

He realised with relief that Dr Shilling had come back into the room, and that he was putting an arm about Imogen and guiding her to the door. As she went with him Dan felt something unfamiliar and painful tear at his heart. He wanted to put his arms around her and say, listen, it's all right, Imogen. You didn't do this and nobody really thinks you did. It could not be done. One of the aunts went with them, murmuring something about sedatives and hot water bottles. Dan bit down a sudden wish to go with them, to make sure that Imogen really was all right. As the door closed behind them he turned back to Thalia, and sensed every other person in the room doing the same.

Edmund's mother had not moved. She was standing stock-still, but there was no doubt about the malevolence and the black, bitter hatred. And if we're still talking about force fields, thought Dan, this one's the champion magnet.

When Thalia finally spoke, she did so softly, but every single person heard her.

‘It looks as if it's happened again,' said Thalia. ‘The thing we've all dreaded. The Ingram madness. Lucienne's madness. Sybilla's.'

Her voice was ordinary and down-to-earth. If she had lifted one hand and pointed like some pantomimic Tragic Muse, if she had cried,
‘The mark! She's got it! The mark!'
the horror would have plummeted into melodrama and Dan would probably have washed his hands of the whole affair and made a disgusted exit. But Clytemnestras do not stalk twentieth-century drawing rooms in Hampstead, and tragediennes are trapped and held for ever in the timeless lime-lit oblongs of Victorian stages. Thalia left it at that. When she spoke again, it was to Royston, as directly and as intimately as if they were alone in the room. ‘You know, I did warn you,' she said. ‘When she was born, I did warn you.'

Dan thought Royston tried to speak and saw him fail, and in the same moment someone on the other side of the room began to cry, and someone else said in a whisper, ‘After all their care, after the way they
guarded
her – it's too cruel.'

And then Aunt Dilys's voice, ‘Does it mean . . .?'

‘I'm afraid it means,' said Thalia, her voice as bleak as a January dawn, ‘that she'll have to be put away. For ever.'

It had served the whey-faced bitch right to have everyone in the room staring at her with that horrified disgust.

There had, in fact, almost been a moment when Thalia could have felt sorry for Imogen, but it had vanished instantly, and she had been suddenly and violently glad of the creature's humiliation. The spark of hatred that had flared up when Imogen survived in the car crash and Edmund died, was already blazing up into a consuming passion.

Hatred. Vengeance. Who would have thought it would be such a fiercely satisfying emotion? Thalia, her mind splintered with agony, her world in tattered fragments, had looked at Imogen after Edmund's death, and thought: you smug cat, why didn't you die instead? It had been then that the cold vicious hatred had ignited, and it had been then that the idea of punishing Imogen – of making sure that Imogen could never enjoy her own heritage – had taken root. There had been a deep and fierce delight in laying plans and weaving toils. Imogen must be punished.

Put away for ever
. . . The words had had a satisfying ring, even though she had spoken them so softly. This was something Thalia had learned from the tedious committees and the boring charity groups: that it was not the table-thumpers people took notice of, it was the softly-spoken, the unemphatic. The more laid back people were, the more impact they made. There had been impact in what she had said about Imogen, and there would be impact in what she was going to say to the family in the small room Royston called his study, where everybody was gathering to discuss what must be done.

Royston would not be there, but this did not matter. He had been useless and ineffective when they were both children, and he had been useless and ineffective today. He had seen his cherished daughter publicly exposed as a mad thing and he had not been able to face it, which was why John Shilling had had to give him a shot of something or other. Thalia had pretended to be concerned, but she would not have minded if Royston had been left to die of heart pains there on the floor. Royston and Eloise should be dealt their share of punishment. The strong, satisfying hatred welled up in Thalia again. Neither of them would be able to prevent it.

Eloise would certainly not be at the family discussion. She had taken refuge in one of her ridiculous swoons, with that besotted fool Shilling in attendance. It would be nice to think that Eloise was cheating on Royston with John Shilling, but it was not very likely; she was a cold, frigid bitch. The wonder was that she had ever got into bed with Royston; the pity was that she had stayed there long enough for Imogen to be conceived. Dr Shilling pampered her invalid whims, of course, which was about all he was good for. He had painstakingly administered sedatives to various people today and he had sent for a mix of soda bicarbonate for Cousin Elspeth who was always sick at the least provocation but who might at least have opened the window and done it on the shrubbery.

And Imogen was going to be shut away. Thalia licked the idea greedily in her mind. It was a good thought; it was a
satisfying
thought. It served Royston and Eloise right for wrapping up the wide-eyed little shrew in cotton wool so that no breath of harm should ever reach her – and so that the Ingram madness should be kept at bay. It served them right for wanting to keep Edmund out of Ingram's Books, and for being patronising about his intelligence. Edmund had been as intelligent as any of the family; in fact he had been more intelligent than most of them put together. It was true that he had not bothered with tedious exams and A levels for university, but this had only been because there were more interesting things for him to do.

Thalia came softly down the back stairway, pausing for a moment on the half-landing. Everything dealt with? Yes. She went quietly through the big kitchen, deserted now. All well in here? Yes again. Now for the family. She took a deep breath and paused before crossing the hall with the black and white chequered floor that some mid-Victorian Ingram had put down, and the Benares brass table that Colonel Ralph Ingram of the India Army had brought back. The family were about to go into conclave, exactly as Ralph and his lady had done over Lucienne, and exactly as Sybilla's parents had done. The motto of Ralph's regiment had been something about protecting your own, which was what the Ingrams had always done anyway. Thalia was not in the least interested in protecting Imogen, but she was very interested indeed in avenging Edmund's death.

D
an had not managed to get into the conclave; he had not even tried because there was only so far you could get with such a thin disguise. He had been unchallenged at the wake but he would certainly have been unmasked at a serious family discussion.

He left the house quietly and inconspicuously, and went back to his flat in Belsize Park where he sat at his desk for a long time, staring out of the window, scanning the mental notes he had made.

What had happened today was something that defied reporting. Dan tried out a few phrases. ‘The funeral service of Edmund Caudle, heir apparent to Ingram's Books, took place today, and was . . .' Was what? Marred by the appearance of the deceased's severed, refrigerated head among the buffet lunch? Enlivened by the onset of madness in his sixteen-year-old cousin? Dan stared out of his window at the view of the rooftops, and saw again Imogen Ingram's extraordinary beauty and felt again the dark tanglewood web seething just below the surface of that comfortable house. Better, really, to try to forget the whole thing. There were other ways of paying gas bills, for heaven's sake.

He dragged the cover off his typewriter and forced a sheet of paper angrily into the roller. He would have to turn in some kind of report, but he would be wary. Phrases like ‘taken suddenly ill' and ‘collapsed during lunch' shaped in his mind.

But all the time he was typing, Imogen's face kept coming between him and the text, and somewhere beyond the slick facility of his article he was aware of an idea struggling upwards.

A story – no, dammit, a full-blown novel! – about a girl who was born under, and lived with, some kind of creeping, encroaching danger. A girl who was somehow cursed from birth, and because of it was guarded and protected so that the curse should never materialise but who was eventually and inevitably overtaken by it on her seventeenth birthday. And then was shut into a walled-up castle for a hundred years until she could be woken by a handsome prince's kiss? jeered Dan's mind. Jesus God, Daniel, that's been done a thousand times, ever since Jacob Grimm said to his brother, ‘Wilhelm, let us collect up the fairy stories of central Europe and flog the most macabre as children's entertainment.' Ever since Charles Perrault and Basile and a dozen others. Ever since Disney and his brethren took it into the realms of technicolour whimsy and tweeness.

But the idea would not go away. The Ingram family had caught his imagination, and the notion of a book about them had been forming ever since he had entered the Hampstead house. Now the idea of writing it as fiction – a dark, increasingly menacing tale, peopled with thin, haggardly beautiful widows and Lily Maids and indulgent spinster aunts, with Imogen at the heart – forced its way upwards. It was a ridiculous idea, of course, and yet—

No, it could not be done. I'm not listening to you, said Dan to the idea. I don't want to know about you, and I'm going to pretend you're not there.

This worked for a full five minutes, at the end of which Dan swore loudly, tore the sheet of paper out of his typewriter and threw it across the room, and then tipped his chair back to stare out of the window again. The rooftops were shiny with rain and it was getting dark. This was the time of day he liked best. His flat was at the top of an old Georgian-cum-Regency house; it was what the estate agents called a lateral conversion, spread across the top floors of two adjoining properties so that the rooms were huge and the ceilings high. When dusk started to shroud London, from up here you could see little clusters of lights coming on, and you could see the long, snaking, bead-necklace of car headlights that were the perpetual rush hour on the Finchley Road.