Perhaps he was trying to frighten her. People did that sometimes - undermined you, sapped your confidence, suggested you were depressed, or living in the past. But that was different altogether from suffering from dementia. Anyway, how could she be gaga when she did the crossword every day, and read
The Times
from cover to cover? “Look, Colin,” she said, adopting a brisk, businesslike tone, to counteract the image of a grim high-walled Institution, which had suddenly reared up between them. “I don’t know what you intend to do with that thing, but you can’t just chuck it out. It could do serious damage, if someone were to stumble on it. It might even kill a child. I suggest you take it to the police station and ask them to dispose of it. And I suggest you go
now
- this minute.”
“No fear! I’m far too busy. They’ll make me fill in all those stupid forms, which’ll waste the rest of the day.”
Could he be scared of the police? He might have acquired the rapier not for a fancy dress party but to do away with someone. To do away with
her
. Most acts of violence took place in the home, or so she’d read in the paper. The bleak grey walls of the mental Institution turned into a prison, with Colin handcuffed in a cell, begging for release. “So what are you going to do with it?”
“I’ll put it in the out-house for the moment. Then I’m off to the dump with Jasper’s stuff.”
Once she heard the car door slam, she crept out to the cellar and stood at the door, paralysed with fear. She could see herself spread-eagled on the floor, one leg twisted grotesquely back on itself, the tiny unborn twins reeling with the shock of the fall. Although she hadn’t actually miscarried until she reached the hospital, she always visualised their pathetic little bodies lying shattered on the cellar steps. Those babies already had names then: Anthony and Anna. Every July, she still remembered their birthday - what would have been their birthday - still filled imaginary stockings every Christmas Eve.
She forced herself to open the door, casting a panicked glance at the flight of steep stone steps, plunging down to peril and decay. Already she was sweating with fear, wrinkling her nose against the smell of rotting remains. “Don’t be stupid,” she told herself, “there’s no smell whatsoever, no trace of blood on the steps.”
She took them one at a time, clinging to the banister rail, and ready to plunge back any moment to the safety of the kitchen. At last, she reached the bottom step and looked nervously around, astonished to see not piles of junk and swathes of dirt, but a clean and well-swept room - cluttered, yes, but cluttered with intriguing things. A model railway was laid out on a table, its metal tracks gleaming, the carriages liveried in smart maroon. On another table was a half-completed jigsaw puzzle of Van Gogh’s
Sunflowers
, in radiant yellows and golds. And underneath the table was a row of Gro-bags, each boasting a crop of healthy-looking mushrooms.
The mushrooms she used for cooking were poor things in comparison: supermarket mushrooms, plastic-packed. Yet here was Colin’s own private home-grown supply, unrevealed, unshared. And she, too, loved jigsaw puzzles, especially challenging ones with a limited colour range. Couldn’t they have done it together - upstairs? And there was room for the model railway upstairs - plenty of space in Colin’s study, or even in the lounge.
She tiptoed over to inspect it, still feeling an intruder here, and thus trying to make her movements unobtrusive. Crouching down at eye level, she saw it was more than just a railway - a whole model village, in fact, with houses, shops, a church and pub and, in the centre, the railway station itself, complete with platform, level-crossing, goods yard and signal box. The detail was amazing. There were passengers on the station: perfectly proportioned little people, dressed in coats and hats, and holding miniature cases and umbrellas. Each railway carriage was meticulously constructed, even down to the interiors. One boasted a luxurious restaurant car, its tables laid with snowy white cloths and lit by tiny gold lamps. The others had plush upholstered seats, topped by minuscule luggage racks, and containing more small but lifelike passengers reading papers or smoking cigars.
What in heaven’s name had all this cost? Not to mention the price of that château-bottled wine; those rare coins in mint condition. Was this the reason they’d been forced to sell their house? - not, as Colin claimed, because of the rising costs of running it, but because he had poured their money into this subterranean treasure-vault.
She sank into his easy chair. Even that was cosily set up, with cushions and a tartan rug.
One
easy chair, not two, though. Yes, that’s what hurt, and much more than the cost - the way he had excluded her. Why should
he
mind losing their house when he had a village-full of houses here - a romantic little Happy Valley, entire in itself, and his alone?
And his empire spread well beyond the village. Wherever she looked were more of his possessions: a dartboard on the wall, flanked by two model ships, a pile of encyclopaedias, a brass telescope, an exercise bike. This was Colin’s other life, which he had totally concealed from her. Oh, of course she knew that he was often in the cellar, but he always told her he was mending things: soldering an old radio, repairing a vacuum cleaner, stripping and varnishing a damaged grandfather clock. And when she queried the hours it seemed to take, he would go into laborious detail about
other
time-consuming projects - he was re-plastering the cellar walls, re-laying the concrete floor. Yet there was no sign or smell of fresh plaster, and the floor was neatly covered with off-cuts of their bedroom carpet. Yes, another bedroom, for his adulterous affair. This was worse than another woman - this was another universe.
“Elaine! Elaine! Where are you?”
She sprang to her feet. He was back, and looking for her. She darted behind an old workbench as she heard his feet tramping down the steps. Too late. He’d seen her, grabbed her arm.
“Darling, you mustn’t come down here. You know how dangerous it is.”
She shook him off. Of course she knew - all the more so now.
He seized her by the shoulder, trying to usher her back upstairs. Wrenching free, she ran back up unaided. She
wanted
to escape, now that she had discovered his betrayal.
“Watch out! You’ll trip.
Who cared? If she fell again, there was nothing more to lose - no babies, and no husband. Both were lost already.
He pounded after her, letting out a flood of words, trying to excuse himself, trying to explain. He followed her into the kitchen and sat opposite, still jabbering away. She let the words wash over her, craning her neck to peer up at the SOLD sign through the window. The O was silent now - and rightly so. No point crying. No point speaking, either. She didn’t intend discussing things with Colin. Nor did she intend moving into the flat with him.
This was not the man she had married.
I
t all started with toast - fingers of toast she’d been given as a child to eat with her boiled egg. Nanny used to tell her that every piece not finished might well feel unloved and cry buttery toast-tears. The thought had so distressed her, she never left a single crumb.
Things got worse at school. The other children detested food like Dead Man’s Leg and Frogspawn, but
she
could hear it weeping when left untouched on their plates, so of course she had no choice but to eat it.
And
the bits of fat and gristle, the bacon rinds and cheese parings. She never put on weight, though. All the surplus energy was burned off in constant worry - worry about mouldy apples discarded outside greengrocers’ shops, or cracked eggs thrown in waste-bins, or even fragments of chocolate trapped inside a wrapper. Did they cry chocolate tears?
Sometimes, it appeared, the whole world of food was weeping, especially in hot weather: milk on the turn, bananas turning black, ice-cream dripping tragically from cones.
In adolescence, her sympathies roved further to embrace ants, moths, beetles, spiders, flies - anything killed, swatted, trodden on, or flushed cruelly down a plug-hole by other, sterner people, deaf to their shrieks of pain.
“You’re too thin-skinned,” Aunt Freda had reproved.”If you want to exist in the adult world, you’ll have to toughen up.”
She had peered at her skin, which did indeed look thin: the veins too near the surface; knobs of bone, with barely any covering, making strange protuberances in her hands and wrists and feet. Then, when she’d fallen off her bike and had to have her arm stitched, the doctor had confirmed Aunt Freda’s words. “I’ve never seen such thin skin in my entire professional life. It’s like the skin of an old woman, which at
your
age is ridiculous. I’ll have to use special stitches to get them to hold at all.”
For the next few weeks, she’d been too scared to use the arm, constantly expecting the wound to gape apart. Why couldn’t skin be made of steel, she wondered, to prevent it ripping and tearing? Or people have lemonade pumping through their bodies instead of frighteningly scarlet blood?
And now, at twenty-seven, she still used her left arm in preference to her right, which could make things rather difficult - even minor matters like answering the doorbell. It was ringing at this very moment, insistently, aggressively.
Having picked her way between the piles of clutter, she tugged weakly at the door-handle with her scarred and shaky arm; the bell shrilling a second, louder blast, as if deploring the delay.
A dapper little man, with neatly cropped black hair and a matching toothbrush-moustache was standing on the doorstep. “Good afternoon,” he said.
Was it afternoon? Last time she’d checked the time, it had been only ten past ten - unless the clock had stopped.
“My name is Austin Beamish.” He held out his identity card, which showed his face in miniature, though looking slightly younger than the flesh-and-blood equivalent. “Environmental Health Officer.”
“Oh, do come in.” Anyone who took environmental issues seriously was welcome in her home. She often lay awake at night, worrying about climate change and holes in ozone layers. “I’m sorry about the mess,” she said, leading him a zigzag path between the various obstacles, towards the only chair. “Please sit down.”
“Aren’t
you
going to sit?’’
“I’m afraid I can’t.” She gave an embarrassed laugh. “I won’t go into details, but it’s best for me to stand.” That wretched bike again. After years of cycling, the skin at the base of her coccyx had finally worn through, leaving a raw red area, which was extremely painful if she put any pressure on it. Simply sitting on a chair could make it start to bleed. In fact, much the same had happened in the middle of her back, where pressure from the fastening of her bra had rubbed another raw place. Her body needed patching, like she patched the frayed knees of her jeans, but, alas, extra pieces of human skin weren’t as easy to come by as offcuts of blue denim. “Can I get you a coffee?” she offered, wincing as a pain shot through her arm. Neither she nor it had ever really recovered from the fall.
“No, thank you.” He cleared his throat. “This is not a social visit, Miss Mackenzie.”
“Do call me Daisy,” she urged, crouching down beside his chair, so they were on roughly the same level. A pity about the moustache. It made him look both sinister and comic, and the combination was just a shade unsettling.
He removed a large beige folder from his briefcase and sat tapping a pen against it. “I’m afraid there’s been a complaint from one of your neighbours.”
“A complaint?’ No one could make less noise than her. She didn’t own a radio or television, and, as for parties, the very idea was laughable. Her friends were so thin on the ground these days that, were she to drop down dead tomorrow, the only guests at her funeral would be the bats living in the bell-tower and the mournful crows that pecked around the churchyard - both (conveniently) black-garbed.
“I believe,” said Mr Beamish, glancing around the room with an expression of distaste, “you have an infestation of mice.”
“Oh, the
mice
! God love them. They’re no trouble.”
“Mice are vermin, Miss Mack … er, Daisy. And most definitely a health hazard.”
“No, mine aren’t.” She could hardly hear a sound from them at present - not a rustle, not the faintest scrabble - but then they were always scared by strangers, and Mr Beamish’s deep yet querulous voice would have had them all quivering in their lair behind the skirting board.
His frown intensified, cutting a ravine between his brows. “They carry diseases - serious diseases such as Leptospirosis, and Salmonellosis, which is transmitted onto food and drink in their excrement. And their continual dribble of urine causes contamination of food.”
Offended, she drew herself up to her full height again. The mice shared her life, for heaven’s sake, so to have this man revile them was, to say the least, insulting.
“They also constitute a fire hazard because they can gnaw through electric cables. I don’t know whether you realize, but their incisor teeth grow significantly each year.”
“Of course I realize. In fact, I’m quite concerned about it. If their teeth get too long, the poor things find it difficult to eat. But I give them stuff to chew on - blocks of wood and dog biscuits - and that keeps their teeth nicely short and sharp.”
He gave her a look that combined horror with incredulity. “But, that way, you
encourage
them, which is the last thing you should do. I have no wish to be rude, Miss Mackenzie, but the conditions in this room leave a lot to be desired.”
She tried to see the place through his eyes. Yes, it was dirty, but mice liked a bit of dirt; yes, it was dark, but mice were nocturnal creatures and, by keeping the curtains drawn, she was gradually giving them confidence to come out in the daytime as well as just at night. Besides, the late December weather was so depressingly cold and dank, she preferred to block it out.
“For one thing, it smells extremely bad.”
“Oh, you get used to that in time. In any case, the smell is probably nice to them. You know, like dogs who sniff round lamp-posts or roll in steaming cowpats. I don’t think it’s actually right for us to judge what’s good or bad for other species.”