Last Act of All (27 page)

And
now, here was His Nibbs telling her she couldn’t go. She had protested, of course. What, miss the pleasure of seeing Karen’s face when she opened the box and found the beautiful leather jacket she wanted and couldn’t afford! Not that Mrs Beally could really afford it either, but that snotty little bitch upstairs wouldn’t know how much had been spent on Christmas cheer, and he certainly wouldn’t ask to see the receipts.

But
‘People do not choose their times to be ill, and this is a surgeon’s house, Mrs Beally,’ he had said coldly. ‘When you accepted employment in it, you were told that the hours would be awkward and there would be sudden demands upon your time, and you have been paid accordingly. If you refuse to carry out your duties tomorrow, then you can find alternative employment. I shall not expect you back. Is that clear?’

For
all she would have liked to fling his lousy job in his face, caution held her back. She had a good place here; wages well above what anyone else was offering, no one to criticize her cleaning, and good pickings, with no questions asked about a fiver here or a tenner there. He had her over a barrel, the bastard, and she had had to submit.

But
she wasn’t beaten yet, not she, and though she phoned to order the morning taxi for His Nibbs, she did not cancel her own, booked for a little later.

She
was quite confident the child could be made to keep quiet. She barely talked to her father, anyway, and she was too scared of the rough side of Mrs Beally’s tongue to try playing up.

So
there was nothing to stop her going, once he was safely out of the way. And after all, it was downright unchristian to keep you apart from your family on Christmas Day, wasn’t it? It was in a spirit of righteous self-justification that she thrust the turkey into the oven.

When
her employer’s taxi had gone in the morning, she woke her charge, telling her to get downstairs quickly now, and adding, without conscious irony, ‘Merry Christmas!’

She
had put on her outdoor coat and gathered together her pile of Christmas parcels by the time the girl had dressed and come downstairs. Mrs Beally did not meet her eyes.

‘
Now, your dad’s had to go to the hospital, and the taxi’s coming for me any minute. There’s your breakfast – look, I’ve made you bacon and eggs for a treat – so you eat that, and then when it’s dinner time just get your dinner out of the oven. It’s all plated up for you, and all you have to do is turn off the oven after, like a good girl.’

‘
But you can’t leave me here, all by myself!’ Sheer terror lent her courage. ‘My father wouldn’t let you!’

At
these signs of rebellion, the woman’s lips tightened.

‘
Oh, can’t I, my fine lady! We’ll soon see about that. Your father doesn’t care tuppence, or he wouldn’t have gone away today, would he? And if you complain, he’ll be ever so angry. And I’ll be angry too, so just you remember that.’

She
shrank back, as if she had been physically struck, and Mrs Beally was quick to follow up her advantage.

‘
That’s right. You’re a big girl now, not a baby. The day’ll pass, quick as a wink – you just watch the telly, or read a nice book – you’ve plenty of nice books. You’ll have had a big meal, you won’t be needing supper, so just get yourself to bed if I’m not back. You’ve done that often enough, and I’ll see you in the morning. And not a word to go worrying your poor pa now, mind.’

The
taxi hooted outside, and in a flurry of parcels she bundled herself in and was off into the falling snow.

***

The house was very, very quiet now Mrs Beally had gone. Her head felt funny, strange and light, as if it might float away off her shoulders, and her hands felt clammy. There was no sound of wind or birdsong outside in the snowy hush, and inside only the ticking of the kitchen clock which grew insidiously louder and louder, until with a little shriek she clapped her hands over her ears and fled the room.

Across
the hall, the door to her father’s study stood ajar. She paused, hesitated, then went in.

In
a tray on his desk there lay a pile of envelopes, unopened, and feeling very wicked she tiptoed across and leafed through them. Most of them looked like Christmas cards, but one had a crest on it that she recognized from her blazer.

She
took a long, shaky breath. She didn’t want to listen to Missy, but she couldn’t bear Daddy being angry. She stared at the horrible missive, then, without opening it, crumpled it up and stuffed it deep in among the papers in the waste-bin. Then she shot out, as if all the demons in hell were after her.

As
she ran upstairs, she made a little bargain with – something, she didn’t know what. If people were nice to her again, and no more horrible things happened, she would put Missy away, and never ever ever speak to her again. She felt a little better after that.

But
outside the long staircase window, snow was falling, and the wind was getting up now, blowing round the house with strange sighs and moanings. She shivered. How dark it was! The far side of the landing was in shadow, the doorways black.

Perhaps
she should go to bed, pull the covers over her head and try to sleep the time away like some suffering animal. But it was Christmas Day, and she was still child enough to remember that the Christmas tree was in the drawing room. She scuttled in, closing the door carefully behind her.

The
tinsel on the tree sparkled in the livid light and the cheap baubles gleamed. She switched on the lights, then stepped back to look.

But
the little gaudy bulbs somehow took any magic out of it. The family Christmas tree had always dipped and danced in the flickering, perilous light of candles; this tree was plastic, unreal, nothing to do with Christmas.

She
sighed, and her eyes fell on the presents beneath the tree. There were only two; the pen she had chosen and wrapped so lovingly for her father, which was still there, and just one for her. There had been parcels from her American aunts and uncles, but Mrs Beally had indifferently allowed her to open them as they arrived – indeed, had abstracted some gifts that she ‘wouldn’t be needing’ to give to Karen’s family. There was nothing yet from Gervase. He had said she would prefer something from Austria, though she wasn’t sure.

She
picked up the single parcel, weighing it in her hand. It was not very heavy, and it rattled softly when she shook it.

The
label didn’t say happy Christmas, but it did say ‘with love’ in her father’s writing. She thought Mrs Beally had probably bought it, but he had written the label. He had remembered her. Her heart lifting a little, she opened it.

It
was a nurse’s outfit. Red cape, apron and cap, a mock watch to pin on. A tray, with syringe and tweezers. A grey ligature with tube and rubber bulb, to take blood-pressure. Bandages, thermometer. All neatly packed together.

Her
eyes dilated, but she did not see the details of the small plastic replicas. Like Mrs Beally, she did not notice that it said, ‘Recommended age 4-6’ on the box. She recoiled from the loathsome thing, then in utter revulsion threw it from her, fled to the bathroom and was violently sick.

To
be fair, Mrs Beally had meant no harm. The nurse’s outfit was cheap, with lots of items – a good bargain, in her book – and the girl was a doctor’s daughter. It didn’t occur to her that it might be inappropriate for a child who had last seen her mother surrounded by objects of this kind.

When
she came out of the bathroom, she was weak and trembling, but her movements were decisive. She marched in, picked up the hated gift, placed it neatly in the fireplace, and fetched matches and firelighters from the log box.

The
flames took a moment to catch hold, then flickered up, brighter and stronger. The colourings in the box tinged them with chemical blue and yellow; the plastic shrivelled and smelled, forming melted blobs in strange, contorted shapes. Fascinated, she put on more firelighters, watching them flare up too, consuming what was left.

She
looked at the horrid little tree, and started pulling things off. The tinsel burned merrily and the paint on the baubles sent up sparks of green and gold. She smashed them with the poker, and soon the tree was exposed and ridiculous with its fake lights, rigid branches and unconvincing pine needles. She would have liked to burn the whole horrible thing, but it was too big to fit in the fireplace.

Her
lovely blaze was dying now, and with it her brief pleasure. There had been a strange comfort in the leaping flames, and she would have loved to go on feeding its ravenous appetite, but somehow she did not quite dare. What if her father noticed the bare tree, or asked to see her present? She didn’t think he would, but she cast a lingering glance at the ashes of her fire then drifted aimlessly out of the room.

Her
purged stomach was empty and uncomfortable, so she went to look for food. Breakfast lay, in a pool of cold fat, on the kitchen table, so, though it was not yet ten o’clock, she went to the oven and took out the Christmas lunch which had been left for her. It was burning round the edges already, gluey gravy baked on to the plate, turkey dry and brussels sprouts brown, but she ate it indifferently, and the plum pudding with thick custard.

When
it was finished, she rose to wander restlessly about the house. Upstairs, her own room felt cold and unfriendly; even the familiar Raggedy Ann doll that always slept in her bed seemed to look back at her with a dead, fixed stare.

On
her little desk by the window, there was a book, covered in pale blue suede. ‘My diary’, its cover said in gold, and it had been in her Christmas stocking last year.

She
opened it and looked at the entries, frequent to start with, then more sporadic, then, eloquently, missing. She took out the gold pen from its slot at the side, sat down and turned to the date which was burned in her mind.

‘
Mommy died on this day,’ she wrote in her unformed hand,’ and I wish I could be dead too.’

She
wrote for some time, with concentration, over several pages. But then there was nothing more to say, and she put back the pen and closed the book.

It
was ten forty-five when she settled down in front of the television. She did not move. She did not smile at the massed talents of British television comedy. Perhaps she did not hear. The telephone rang, once; she listened to it echoing through the empty house but did not try to answer it, and soon it stopped.

Somehow
the hours passed. Once she fetched biscuits and milk, then sat down again to watch the flickering black-and-white shadows that helped keep panic at bay.

For
outside, it was getting dark. All day it had snowed, and now the wind was howling in earnest. The house was stirring and muttering to itself in the gale.

As
the light faded, the shadows in the corners of the big room seemed, eerily, to thicken and encroach, and although she was not cold, she felt a shiver run up her spine. Was there someone – something – over there, behind the big armchair?

Suddenly,
into her head came the vicar’s words to her on that dreadful day when they had put Mommy in a box in the ground. ‘Your mother isn’t really gone,’ he had said, patting her shoulder. ‘Your mother will always be watching over you.’

For
the first time, she thought of her mother, not as an aching absence in her life, but as a
dead
person
, a creature with strange powers she had not possessed in life. What if she came now, dead and with long bony fingers, to carry away the daughter she had loved to be with her for ever in some place of blackness and shadows where everyone else was dead too?

She
shoved her knuckles into her mouth to stop herself from screaming. It was better to be silent, motionless, in the weird glow of the television screen than to get up to turn on the light. Light might chase away the shadows –
but what
might
remain
when
the
shadows
fled?
Cramped and rigid, barely daring to breathe, she sat huddled in her chair, glassily unseeing in an interminable torture of terror.

It
seemed a long, long time later that at last she heard a taxi coming up the drive. With frantic energy she leaped from her chair, ran out of the room and downstairs to see, miraculously, her father, not Mrs Beally, climbing out.

‘
Daddy, Daddy!’ she shrieked, throwing herself at him as he opened the front door, desperate for his protection and assurance that now everything would be all right.

But
Daddy hardly seemed to see her. Looking over her head he detached the clinging arms and put her inexorably aside.

‘F
or God’s sake, not now,’ he groaned, and reaching his study like a wounded animal crawling to its lair, he shut the door on the stricken child.

***

It was from Mrs Beally the next morning that she learned of her brother’s death in an avalanche.