A Dark Dividing (4 page)

S
IMONE WAS NINE when she discovered the word ‘possession’, which was not a word she had ever heard before. She asked Mother about it, doing so in a carefully casual voice, and Mother said that once upon a time there had been a belief that a person’s mind could be taken over by another person’s mind, but it was not true, of course, and where on earth had Simone picked that one up?

‘Um, just in a book. It isn’t true, then? About people’s minds being taken over?’

Mother said it was very definitely not true. It was simply an old-fashioned superstition, and Simone did not need to be thinking or worrying about such things.

Mother was pretty clever, but Simone knew she was wrong to say that possession was only a superstition. She knew that the little girl who lived partly inside her own mind was trying to possess her. Sometimes she appeared in scary dreams, and took Simone’s hands and tried to pull Simone into her own world.

‘For company,’ she said. ‘You’d be my friend, and I’d never be on my own again. Wouldn’t you like that? We’d be together for always.’

But Simone thought she would not like it at all because each time the dreams came she had glimpses of that other world, and she had glimpses of the place where the little girl seemed to live. It was a bit puzzling; there were cold stone floors and grim-faced people, and clanging iron doors that were locked at precisely the same time each night. In some complicated way the little girl seemed to have lived in the black cold place for practically her whole life. Simone did not really understand this, because she did not think people lived in houses like that these days.

To begin with she had thought the black stone house might be a prison, but then she thought that children did not get put in prisons. It might be a hospital, except that hospitals were clean sharp places, full of light and busy brisk people; Simone knew that on account of once having to go to hospital when she fell off her bike. She had had to have her leg stitched up and they had given her an anti-tetanus shot, and the nurse who had done it had said, in a bright voice, Dear goodness, what were those marks on her left side, they were surely not scars, were they?—and in an offhand voice that Simone thought she was not meant to hear, Mother had said something about a difficult birth. But she had thought later on that the nurse was a bit dim not to know about birthmarks, which Mother said lots of people had; it was not a particularly big deal although it was probably better to be a bit discreet about when Simone went swimming or changed for games at school.

The black stone house where the little girl seemed to live was not bright or brisk, and the people who lived there did not talk in that over-bright, slightly false kind of way. But wherever it was it was becoming gradually clearer to Simone, just as the little girl was becoming gradually clearer.

It was quite difficult to imagine what it must be like to live in one place all your entire life. Simone and Mother had moved around and lived in quite a lot of different places, and each time they went to a new house Mother said, ‘There, now we’re nicely settled,’ but they never were, and after a time—it might be quite a long time but sometimes it was only a few months—the frightened look came back into Mother’s eyes and they were off again, looking for somewhere else and packing things up, and choosing another town.

The little girl knew about the moving around, because she knew about most things Simone did. She did not wholly understand this part of Simone’s life, but she said that if Simone moved so often one day she should come to live near her. Simone could fix that, couldn’t she? It was usually pretty easy to fix things with grown-ups. There was an impression of some strong dislike about this—Simone thought the word was contempt, as if the little girl did not much like grown-ups. As if she liked getting the better of them.

‘Yes, I do like getting the better of them,’ she said. ‘If you come to live here, I can tell you properly about that. We can be really together then. That would be extra specially good, wouldn’t it?’

The little girl lived in a place called the Welsh Marches, she said—it was the part where England began to be Wales. Simone had never heard of it, and she was not sure if she wanted to live as near as all that to the little girl; she thought she might be a bit frightened of her.

But she looked up the Welsh Marches in her school atlas and asked a question about it in geography one day. It sounded pretty good. There had been a lot of battles between people who wanted to protect Wales and people who wanted to take it over, which was interesting. And the Welsh people had written a great many ballads and poems and beautiful music about their history, said the teacher, pleased with Simone’s interest. They might have a lesson specially about it next week, and they might make it their term-project as well if everyone agreed. Simone had done very well to raise such an interesting topic.

Simone told Mother about the project, and about thinking it might be a good place to live one day, and Mother said, vaguely, ‘Oh, I don’t think we’re going to move again, Sim. I really think we’re all right here, don’t you?’

Simone knew they were not all right; she knew that one day Mother would start to get the anxious look again, and she would start glancing through the windows of their house after it got dark as if she was worried that somebody was watching, and asking Simone questions about whether there had been any strangers roaming around the school gates. It might not happen until next year, or it might happen next week, but it would happen in the end because it always did.

Harry Fitzglen finished the article on Angelica Thorne’s gallery opening, and smacked the printer crossly into action.

He had praised the gallery, referring to ‘the newest, but potentially most successful toy of ex-socialite and
It
girl, Angelica Thorne’; had mentioned the attractive ambience of the Bloomsbury house and had even added a couple of sentences about Bloomsbury’s academic provenance, along with a deliberately off-hand reference to William de Blemont’s original thirteenth-century manor of Blemondsbury. This was intended to make the
Bellman
’s readers feel pleasantly intellectual, although to balance things out he had also sprinkled the article with mentions of the famous and the rich who had been present, and had even sent photo-proofs to the
Bellman
’s Women’s Page editor, so that the outfits worn by the merely infamous and rich could have the correct designer labels attached to their outfits. To gratify Markovitch he had woven in the names of a few of Angelica Thorne’s former lovers, although he had omitted to mention the disgraced MP and the multi-millionaire press baron, since both were currently bringing writs for libel against several newspapers.

After this, he had put in a couple of paragraphs about Simone Marriot’s photographs, which would probably be subbed out but which were the best part of the whole thing. As the printer churned out the pages he wondered what had happened to his own idealistic self of ten or twelve years earlier: the young man who had read John Donne and Keats, and planned to write a Booker-winning novel. He fell in with the wrong females and then he fell into the slough of despond, that’s what happened to him, remember? He drowned in a vat of Glenfiddich, like Richard III’s brother in the malmsey butt.

Still, the article was well-written, he knew that without any false vanity. Once upon a time he had been a very good features writer, he knew that without any false vanity as well. Dammit, he had been better than good. He had believed in what he was doing and he had liked his life and thought it worthwhile, until the day he had come home early to discover a letter from Amanda propped up on the mantelpiece, saying she was leaving him, she was in love with someone else, and she knew Harry would not want her to live a lie any longer. It was better to have truth between them, wasn’t it, and she knew he would want her happiness.

This was such all-out and overwhelming balls that Harry had crumpled up the letter in fury, thrown it across the room, and headed for the bottle of Scotch. It had only been when the bottle was almost empty that he had retrieved the letter and smoothed it out to read that Amanda would allow him to divorce her for adultery, and that to defray her current living expenses she had drawn a cheque on their joint deposit account. The cheque, Harry later discovered, was for almost the entire amount in the deposit account and was apparently intended to help Amanda to live through the difficult weeks between the divorce and the remarriage. That she elected to live through those weeks in a flat in an upmarket part of Hampstead did not come as any particular surprise.

What did come as a surprise was that everyone except Harry himself had apparently known who was sleeping in his bed, never mind waking up to eat the porridge. Half of Fleet Street, it seemed, had been sniggering over what Goldilocks was doing, and most of them could have supplied a list of who she was doing it with as well, in fact quite a few of them were actually on the list themselves.

That had been the point at which Harry had gone on that spectacular month-long binge, missing most of his deadlines, and turning up half-cut to interview some blonde airhead starlet who was not so airheaded that she did not know how to complain to a managing director and get Harry fired from the more-than-reputable Sunday broadsheet where he had worked for five years, and where he had been due to be made assistant features editor with a breathlessly eager assistant of his own and a share in a secretary.

But like the famous women’s lib anthem, he had survived. He had made of Amanda’s new husband a figure of ridicule. Absolutely inorganic, he told people. A Trivial Pursuit. And even though he had hit rock bottom hard enough to crack the cement he had eventually started the long climb back into a career, although it was a pity the climb had had to begin on the staff of the
Bellman
.

Since then he had steadfastly avoided beautiful females who thought their looks absolved them from worrying about intelligence or personality or sensitivity, and who invariably ran off with richer, more satisfactory lovers.

But if they were talking about beautiful females with rich lovers…

Harry thought he would have been less than human not to get a kick from walking into Aubergine with Angelica Thorne. She was wearing a mulberry velvet outfit with a very short skirt, and her legs, which were extremely good, were encased in black stockings. No, they would be tights, not stockings. Or would they? It was to be hoped this did not prove a distraction; Harry reminded himself firmly that this was a ruse to find out about Simone and therefore a working dinner, and was rewarded by an inner derisive hoot.

The waiters recognized Angelica of course, and leapt to provide menus and wine-lists, and to enquire whether the table was satisfactory. Would another table be preferred? No, it was no trouble in the least. I’m spending money like a drunken sailor, thought Harry, and what’s worse, I’m spending money I haven’t got.

Angelica talked enthusiastically on the gallery and on the run-up to its opening. ‘For one thing it took ages to find the right place, you can’t imagine the prices of property in London, well, I daresay you can—where did you say you lived? Oh, I see. Oh, rather fun out there, I should think.’

‘A riot. Tell me about finding the house.’

‘Well, it had to be the right part of London, because—oh, they’re doing partridge au choux tonight, let’s have that, shall we?—because the thing is that you can’t have a gallery in the East India Dock Road or Whitechapel, can you? Well, I know there’s the Spitalfields concerts these days and they’re very successful, but I think that might be an exception.’

‘But you found the Bloomsbury house,’ said Harry.

‘Simone found it. She said we absolutely had to have it, never mind what it cost. As a matter of fact,’ said Angelica, ‘she was quite intense about it.’ She broke off to eat the pâté that was the first course. She ate with a kind of hungry sensuality; Harry watched her and remembered the black stockings. He waited, and after a moment Angelica said, ‘I don’t mean to go all Edgar Allan Poe or Susan Hill about her, but at times I wonder if Simone might be—well, wired in to something the rest of us aren’t.’