The Memory of Midnight (16 page)

Luke hadn’t believed her, but Vanessa accepted the explanation without a blink. ‘I’m not surprised in that horrible flat!’

‘It’s not that.’

Tess drew a breath. Ever since the incident with Luke, she had been thinking about how much she wanted to talk to someone about what was happening. It was stupid not to, she had decided in the
end. Whatever she had told Luke, she hadn’t been doing a good job of coping with it by herself, had she?

She half-regretted not telling Luke now, but the opportunity had passed and he had withdrawn like a snail shrinking into its shell. If she hadn’t known better, she would have wondered if
he had been hurt by her refusal to confide in him.

Anyway, wouldn’t it make more sense to talk to Vanessa? It was Vanessa who had befriended Tess when her parents had first moved to York, and they had been inseparable all through school,
hanging around in each other’s bedrooms or in the Museum Gardens until they were old enough to spend Saturday nights in Ziggy’s or Harry’s Bar in Micklegate.

Vanessa had been her closest friend. Until Luke. And though they had lost touch once Tess moved to London, the moment Tess had come back, Vanessa had been there to help. Perhaps Vanessa could be
a bit bossy, and there were times when Tess had to grit her teeth at her smug certainty about everything, but she was kind and she was generous, and they had known each other a long time. If she
couldn’t tell Vanessa, she couldn’t tell anyone.

‘I’ve been having these dreams,’ she said.

‘Dreams?’ Vanessa took her own elbow and pushed it behind her ear. ‘What sort of dreams? Nightmares?’

‘No, well, not exactly. They’re just so vivid, Van. I’m this girl in Elizabethan York. I know it sounds mad, but it’s like I’m her. It’s like I’m
there.
’ Tess flexed her sore fingers impotently, trying to explain. ‘In the dreams, I have memories. I know how the street smells. I know how tight my bodice is laced. I can
taste the food.’ She ran her tongue over her teeth, remembering the congealed sauces with their spicy edge, the heavy pastry, the tantalizing aroma of roasting meat. ‘Do you ever have
dreams like that?’

‘Never.’ Vanessa’s ponytail bounced emphatically when she shook her head. ‘I hardly ever dream. If you ask me, Tess, you’re not tired enough. You should take some
exercise. Come for a run with me and I promise you, you’ll have no problem sleeping.’

‘So you don’t think there’s any chance those dreams might be . . . real?’

‘Real?’

‘Like I might be somehow reliving the life of someone in the past.’

‘Of course not.’ Vanessa laughed, then stopped when she saw Tess’s expression. ‘
You
don’t, surely?’

‘No . . . at least . . . is it so unthinkable?’

‘Tess! You’re not serious?’

Of course she wasn’t serious. How could she be?

‘No . . . it’s just that Mum was reminding me the other day about things I used to see when I was a kid. Things there was no good explanation for.’

‘It doesn’t sound like your mother to encourage you in that!’

‘She didn’t. She said I was just overimaginative.’

‘Well, you
were
a bit of a drama queen at times,’ said Vanessa, and although she smiled, Tess could hear an undercurrent of something – amusement? contempt? – in
her voice.

‘I
was
?’ She didn’t remember that. When she thought about growing up in York, she thought about how desperately self-conscious she had been about her weight. And how
much she had missed her father. She didn’t remember making scenes.

‘Oh, yeah. Remember that school trip to Margaret Clitherow’s house?’

Tess shifted uneasily. ‘No.’ That headache was back, jabbing insistently at her mind.

‘Yes, you do,’ Vanessa insisted. ‘It wasn’t much of a trip as it was only to see the shrine in the Shambles, but they brought us in on a bus. Jeanette had a huge bag of
marshmallows, and we had a race to finish them by the time we got off the bus . . .’ She trailed off when Tess still looked blank. ‘You must remember that!’

‘I don’t.’

‘We were all feeling sick when we got to the Shambles, but of course you had to be sicker than anyone else.’ Vanessa smiled again but the glance that went with it was pin sharp.
‘The rest of us just felt queasy, but you made a huge performance out of it. You started panting and groaning and carrying on, and then you reeled out of the house and threw up all over the
Shambles. It was gross!’ She looked hard at Tess. ‘Oh, come on, I can’t believe you don’t remember that!’

It was coming back. The dim room, the horror lurking in the air. She hadn’t wanted to go inside – Tess did remember that now. There had been a dreadful pressure on her chest, a huge
weight pressing her down, down, down, so that she couldn’t breathe. She didn’t remember getting herself outside, just a roaring sound in her ears. She had been sick, yes, but there was
something wrong with Vanessa’s story . . .

‘I didn’t eat any marshmallows,’ she said slowly.

‘Yes, you did,’ Vanessa corrected her. ‘That’s why you were so sick.’

‘But I never liked them.’

‘I can see why you wouldn’t like them now. Being sick like that would be enough to put anyone off. I’m not surprised you haven’t touched one since. I’m not mad
about them myself.’

‘No, I meant –’ Tess stopped. There was no point in arguing with Vanessa. She was so sure of herself that Tess would never convince her that she wasn’t right.

But she had always loathed marshmallows. Her father had taken her on a memorable camping trip when she was six. Their campfire meal had ended with toasted marshmallows, and was followed that
night by a bout of food poisoning that had inextricably linked the two in Tess’s mind. There was no way she would have stuffed herself with marshmallows on a school trip when she was
thirteen. Something else had made her sick in that house in the Shambles.

Vanessa might be sure Tess had been dramatizing herself, but Tess remembered only the horror, the sensation of being crushed, as Margaret Clitherow had been. They had known about
Margaret’s fate, of course. That was the point of the trip. Margaret Clitherow was a butcher’s wife who had been pressed to death beneath a door for refusing to renounce the Catholic
faith, and who was later canonized. The house where she had lived in the Shambles was now a shrine. So it was always possible that Tess had been so involved in the story that she had had a physical
reaction to it. Overreacted, Vanessa – and no doubt her mother – would say.

But that wasn’t how Tess remembered it.

Why were so many of her memories out of kilter with everyone else’s?

‘I wouldn’t worry about it anyway,’ said Vanessa briskly. ‘It sounds to me as if you’re just overtired. Your marriage has broken down, you’ve moved house . .
. it’s no wonder you’re stressed.’

‘Yes.’ Tess looked away. ‘Yes, I’m sure you’re right.’

Oscar was still engrossed in his game. It was time to change the subject.

‘Hey, you’ll never guess who’s making Richard’s shelves.’

Vanessa paused in mid-stretch. ‘Who?’

‘Luke Hutton.’

She had wanted it to sound a funny coincidence, no big deal, but Vanessa was appalled.

‘You’re kidding! Oh, Tess, you poor thing. How awful for you!’

Tess was taken aback. She had known Vanessa hadn’t cared much for Luke but she hadn’t thought she disliked him that much.

‘It’s okay, really. I don’t mind.’

‘He was such a bastard to you,’ said Vanessa with such venom that Tess found herself driven to defend Luke, something she had never expected to be doing.

‘He wasn’t
that
bad.’

‘He was!’ Vanessa’s mouth was set as she moved onto the other elbow. ‘I always thought he was using you.’

‘Using me?’ Tess let out a little huff of amusement. Either her memory was completely wrong, or Vanessa’s was. ‘How on earth do you work that out? I was just a fat lump,
too shy to talk to anyone. I couldn’t believe he wanted to go out with me at all.’

‘You come from a nice family.’

Tess stared at her friend, wondering if she was joking, but Vanessa seemed perfectly serious.

‘Oh, come on, Van! That’s the last thing someone like Luke would care about.’

‘You think so?’ Vanessa sniffed. ‘You know his father spent some time in prison, don’t you?’

Annoyance bubbled in Tess’s throat. ‘Yes, I did know,’ she said evenly. ‘Luke told me. Not that it’s got anything to do with Luke. If he wanted to cash in on my
connections – although God knows what they were! – he went the wrong way about it when he dumped me, didn’t he?’

‘Only because he could see you were moving onto better things.’

Better things
? Tess thought about her life with Martin and said nothing.

‘I just don’t want you to get hurt again,’ said Vanessa, misreading her silence. ‘You were devastated when Luke dropped you like that. I never trusted him,’ she
said. ‘And how right I was! You just be careful around him, Tess.’

Tess sat at the table in the bay window, but she couldn’t concentrate on the records. The scrawled writing kept blurring on the screen and her eyes were drawn again and
again to the blue sky that beckoned above the rooftops opposite. The flat felt stale, the air oppressive.

Nothing to do with the fact that Luke wasn’t there.

Strange how much safer she felt when he was around. Not that she had been having much to do with him. He didn’t work on the shelves every day, and when he did turn up, he was often gruff.
Once or twice Tess had caught him giving her searching looks, but their conversations were limited to whether or not he wanted a coffee.

Once or twice Tess had caught herself wishing that he would look at her with the same concern again, that he would sit her down and make her tell him what was bothering her, but each time she
pushed the thought aside. She didn’t need Luke Hutton to make things easier for her. If she wanted to talk to him, she could talk to him, she reminded herself.

Her choice. Her way.

It had been two weeks since Tom had left. Since she had
dreamt
about Tom leaving, Tess corrected herself quickly. At odd moments she had found herself thinking about Nell. When the moon
hung over the rooftops, she would look up at it and remember the promise she had made.

No, the promise she had
dreamt
making.

The memory was still extraordinarily vivid but Tess had begun to think that Vanessa was right, and it was just a bizarre episode brought on by the stress of leaving her marriage. It had been
frightening in its intensity, but fascinating at the same time. There was a little bit of Tess that wished she could return and find out what happened to Nell, but whenever she caught herself
thinking that, she would clamp firmly down on the thought to stop it going any further.

Recovered memory was the only reasonable explanation, and that meant Nell had no story. She was just a figment of Tess’s imagination, just like the faces which sometimes jumped into her
head as she worked on the records, making her mind stumble in the startling detail with which she could picture them: Ambrose Cook with his mournful mouth and spindly legs; Michael Mudd,
gap-toothed, bulbous-nosed, his butcher’s hands rimed with dried, brown blood; the widow Barker, her hands knotty, her back buckled; Cuthbert Dawson, with eyes that turned down at the corners
and made him oddly attractive in spite of the stained doublet straining over his substantial stomach.

Tess told herself it didn’t mean anything. They were just echoes of characters in a film she had seen once, or figments of her imagination. They weren’t real.

There had been no more dreams, and she told herself she was glad.

Still, she always preferred it when Luke was around. The sound of him banging and hammering in the study was strangely reassuring. In spite of the restlessness she sensed in him, in spite of the
occasional surliness, there was something steadying about his presence. Once, years earlier, Tess had been wretchedly seasick on a cross-Channel ferry. Her father had told her to concentrate on the
horizon. ‘Keep your eyes on a fixed point,’ he had said. ‘It’ll settle your stomach.’ Now, whenever time and reality threatened to slip and slide, Tess thought of Luke
as her horizon, her fixed point. It seemed to work.

Her hands still felt raw; sometimes the pain was so great she would have to stop typing. But just when she decided that there was no choice but to go to the doctor, the ache would subside, and
she would put it off for another day.

She was still sleeping badly too. More than once Tess had given up and slept on the sofa rather than listen to the anguished scrabbling in the wall. She’d had the pest controllers back,
and twice been back to the builders next door to ask if they would look in the wall, but they had obviously written her off as a crazy lady. There was nothing in the wall, they said. No rats, no
noise, no nothing.

At odd times of the day and night, her phone would ring. Tess always checked the display now, and if it said ‘blocked number’, she would let it ring until voicemail kicked in. There
was never any message. She’d debated getting a new phone, but if it was Martin and he’d tracked down her number, there was nothing to stop him finding the new one. She would wait him
out, Tess decided. As long as she didn’t answer, it was an irritant, no more. But still she jumped every time the phone rang, and she had taken to turning it off as soon as she had picked up
Oscar, much to her mother and Vanessa’s annoyance.

Tess set her teeth against their complaints, against it all. Oscar was happy and that was all that mattered. He liked school, he loved to go and play with Vanessa’s children, Sam and
Rosie, and he rushed home every day to see Ashrafar. He was wary of Luke, and avoided him as much as possible, but he had Bink, he had his mother and he was allowed to watch television. In
Oscar’s world, all was well. Tess intended to keep it that way.

From Martin there was no word. Rather than be reassured, Tess grew more and more tense, waiting for him to make a move. Once or twice she thought she caught a glimpse of him in the street and
her heart would jerk, but when she followed, determined to force a showdown, it always turned out to be a perfect stranger.