Pureheart (15 page)

And she did not talk bitterly of men.

Instead she told new stories.

She told of a solitary life with her beloved grandmother, until she found, at five years old, a friend, the love of her life. And she told of how her jealous old grandmother had sent him away.

She told of finding a treasure with that friend, the most beautiful and important thing in the world, and of how her grandmother had discovered them and banished them forever from access to it.

She told of being hated and feared at school, of how, at thirteen, she had almost been burned at the stake, and of how her friend had saved her even though they had been forbidden to speak to one another, and of how her grandmother had seemed not to care.

And she told of how, at eighteen, she and the love of her life had almost become one forever, and run away together, and found happiness, but how the old woman had stopped them.

She told how she was chained to Corbenic for a reason that was not accessible to her conscious mind, but which was real nonetheless, and so powerful she could never be freed from it.

She told Deirdre's life story as if it were her own.

And she believed it. She believed she owned Deirdre's life and sufferings and joys and memory. She believed they had happened to her, as if Deirdre was not an independent person, but a mere cipher to be lived through. She believed that all suffering belonged to her.

She no longer believed that Deirdre really existed.

Deirdre was her slave indeed.

And it seemed to Deirdre, not only that she had been cast out forever from the Garden of Eden, but that she had somehow found her way to Hell.

That night, Deirdre rose, sleepwalking, in the pitch-dark to do something she could never remember during the daytime. She pulled her white dressing-gown over her white nightdress; lit the candle by the bed, using matches in her top drawer; moved like a ghost through the living room to the bunch of keys that hung by the door; and without waking her grandmother, who slept like a dead woman, stepped out on the landing. She glided through vestibules so lightly it was as if she trod on a cushion of air, up and down stairs, along corridors, across landings, until she came around the corner and into the hallway in the very centre of Corbenic – the strange, rough, stony passage, the corridor it was impossible to find unless you were asleep.

She was coming to tend the little red-gold creature in the crystal box full of sunlight: the great secret of Corbenic; the secret she and Gal had discovered when they were five, and then forgotten. She was coming to feed it, to keep it alive with her love. Only she could do it; only she had the power. Her grandmother had put it here; her grandmother had imprisoned it. But only Deirdre could keep it alive.

Every night, sleepwalking, she visited this sacred place. She had done so every night since she was five.

But on this night, there was something odd, something different.

There was the stone stairway ahead of her. There was the iron gate at the top of it.

But there was no dim red-gold light pouring through the gate, and no sense of presence beyond it. Instead all was empty; all was dark.

Outside, of course, it was the dead of night. But here, in the centre of Corbenic, no matter what the time, no matter what the weather, there was always light, the light she had first seen when she was five years old, and had seen every night of her life since then, a light with the warmth and promise and power and purity of sunlight.

Now it was if something was over, finished forever; as if whatever had been there had abandoned her and would never return.

The dark behind the gate, the sheer absence of light seemed somehow horrific: the most dreadful sight Deirdre had ever seen. She felt suddenly that all hope, all joy had been extinguished; that the thing she most feared, in her very darkest hours, had come to pass. She was dismayed, so deeply dismayed that she woke.

And waking, she was confused, and terrified, and lost. She drew in a great gasp of breath, and began to whimper like an animal being tortured. She stumbled to the stairway, climbed the steps, undid the latch and pulled open the gate, only to feel a sudden strange rush of ice-cold night air.

She stepped into the room.

But there was no room. The door led only to a sheer drop from an opening in one of the outside walls of the building – the same wall in which, many feet below, the hollow storeroom that was the cave stood cold and empty.

And so at last Deirdre took flight, and soared like a white bird, down, down, down into the darkness, leaving Gal alone on the other side.

‘Deirdre? Where are you? Come on! I'm waiting! I've got more things to show you! Lots more things!'

It was the shrill voice of the terrifying little girl, Deirdre's ghost grandmother, calling out from somewhere along the hall ahead of them.

Deirdre looked anguished. She made a movement as if to obey the call. But Gal grabbed her.

Deirdre flinched and withdrew her hand, and he saw for the first time the four livid scratches the ghost child had left.

‘Did she do that to you?'

Deirdre covered the scratches with her other hand.

‘She's just a little girl, Gal,' she pleaded. ‘She's terrified. She's all alone. She needs me.'

‘But you can't help her, Deedee,' said Gal. His mind was racing. He wondered desperately what he could say to persuade her, to make her understand. ‘She's not just a little girl. She's an old woman as well. And a young one, and a middle-aged one. She's everything she ever was in her whole life, all at once, and she's living it over and over again. She's locked in a prison of her own making. All your life, she's been trying to drag you into it with her. But what would that accomplish? She wouldn't be any happier. There would just be two people in prison instead of one. She can't save herself by destroying you.

‘Don't you see what she's doing? She's distracting us. Deliberately. From our quest. She's leading us away from it. I thought we had to face whatever she wanted to show us – I thought we had to go through her obstacle course to get to where we're trying to go. But I don't think that any more. I think it's just a trap.

‘Deedee, you've heard her story. You've spent your life listening to it! You've spent your life trying to heal her. You tried so hard . . . But you can't. You can't heal her. I don't think she can be healed . . . She has an incurable wound. But surely, surely, you weren't born only for this – only to fail at curing something incurable?'

‘
Deirdre!
' called the ghost child. ‘
Deirdre!
'

Her voice was at once so angry and imperious, so plaintive and so reproachful, it chilled both of them to the bone. Deirdre seemed to be in physical pain. But Gal ignored the voice and went on urgently, ‘We have to find it. This is our last chance. Remember what you said, about why she kept building? She's running from it – she spent years running from it. But whatever she's running from is our treasure. We have to let her go. We have to let her run away from it, if she can't face it. But we have to go in the opposite direction. She won't follow us. She's too scared.'

‘
Deirdre!
' shrieked the ghost child.

Deirdre shut her eyes and put her hands to her ears.

‘Why don't you trust me?' said Galahad at last, in desperation. ‘Why did you always trust her more than me?'

And Deirdre looked at him through eyes so dark, so haunted, it was as if he was looking into two black holes.

‘Because she's only Death, Gal,' she said softly. ‘You're Life. And Life is scarier than Death. Believe me.'

Gal opened his mouth to say something. Then stopped, and began again, ‘What –'

For the building had begun to shake gently beneath their feet.

Then there was a splintering noise and the plaster from the ceiling above them started falling like a light snow.

They were standing quite close to one another, facing each other but staring up at the ceiling. Deirdre should have been thinking, it's about to go, it could go at any minute, I can see it going, it's all too late, I've understood too late. Now we'll never find it.

But all she could give her mind to was Gal's warmth, the waves of warmth that seemed to emanate from him, had always emanated from him, as if he were an open fire in a snowy wood. It made her feel drowsy – faint with longing and a sadness she didn't even understand. Suddenly her grandmother was forgotten. Not even the collapse of the building mattered. Now all that mattered was him.

‘You still don't remember, do you?' he said gently, as if there were no danger, as if he wasn't thinking about the building either, although the floor continued to rock like a large boat in a gentle swell and the plaster kept falling, so that they were both getting whiter and whiter in the shower of it, like ghosts of themselves. ‘You don't remember about the day she found us in the cave, the day I left you with your grandmother? You don't even remember anything after the day they tried to burn you. Not about us. Only about her. You don't remember me being any older than thirteen, do you?'

But she didn't know what he was talking about. All she knew was that she loved him.

Suddenly, glancing downwards, she noticed a dark stain on his T-shirt, beneath the jacket. It was like an ink blot or a pressed flower. She did not understand it. It passed through her head that he was wearing a shirt with an abstract design on the front, although she had not noticed it before. But at the same time it frightened her.

Almost without meaning to, she reached out and touched it lightly with her fingers. It was damp, and very warm.

Then she felt a stab of guilt, as if she had transgressed in some way, as if she had touched something forbidden.

But he took the hand she had touched him with and bent his head and kissed it with such passion that it was as if her whole self were in her hand and his whole self was expressed in the act of kissing.

She stared at him, startled. But she didn't move away.

‘You're wounded,' she said.

He didn't stop kissing her.

‘But it must hurt!' she said, as if the kissing had been an answer and she was protesting.

‘All the time,' he murmured.

‘We're not allowed,' she said hopelessly, although already she could barely speak with the joy and the relief and the strange familiarity of the kissing. ‘She'll kill you,' she murmured. ‘She'll kill us both . . .'

He didn't stop kissing her. He never stopped kissing her.

And there was no jealous old woman, or terrifying child, to come and separate them, and it didn't matter about the building collapsing – what mattered was that this should happen first, even if they perished in the attempt. And for Deirdre there were no more words, no more fear, no more darkness, no more cold – only kisses, only warmth, only light, only him.

They clung together on the floor against the wall, their clothes disarranged, their hair and shoulders covered with white plaster, and he kept stroking her arm and kissing the top of her head and rubbing his chin in her hair as the building kept rocking, gently now, beneath them, as if they had just been through a storm in a boat on the open sea. He seemed absent, exhausted, relieved of some kind of burden and yet, at the same time, profoundly sad. And as they sat curled up like the ghosts of two cats she kept thinking with a kind of wonder that he was holding her so completely that she could not be sure where he ended and she began and that she wasn't certain if she was clinging to his hand or her own.

She had held her own hand before. She had had to.

‘Why doesn't it hurt you?' she murmured, looking with infinite tenderness at the strange wound in his chest while she stroked the warm skin down his side. ‘Why doesn't it hurt when I touch you?'

‘You make it better, Deedee. It hurts when you're
not
touching me.'

‘But what is it? How did you get it? I don't understand how you could be walking around with a wound like that. It doesn't seem possible . . .'

‘I don't know when it happened. I seem to have had it all my life. I already had it when we were five. My chest used to hurt all the time and I didn't know why. But it didn't start to bleed until – until –'

He spoke so softly his voice was little more than a whisper; and yet the grief in it overwhelmed her. He took the hand she was stroking him with and kissed the palm of it, closing his eyes.

‘Why are you so sad?' she said.

‘Because this can't be real,' he said.

She sat up and turned so that she could see his face.

‘You're wrong, Gal,' she said earnestly. ‘Everything that happens in this house is real.
It's all true.
Believe me. I know. It's something about time. And memory. They leak here. There aren't any borders – or not the usual ones . . .'

‘That's not what I mean,' he whispered. Then he seemed to search for words. ‘Oh, Deirdre,' he said at last, ‘have you really forgotten? How we used to meet every afternoon at the cave – for years? The first time we kissed? How she stopped us – from doing this? And what happened afterwards? Maybe, if you don't remember, I've no right to –'

He stopped. She was staring at him. And he knew that she understood at last.

‘I'm dead, aren't I?' said Deirdre suddenly.

For a moment Galahad was silent. Then he began to sob.

‘I'm dead,' said Deirdre again. ‘I'm dead.'

‘Yes,' said Galahad, and he was trembling so violently and holding onto her so hard they both shook with his grief.

Deirdre's mind was racing. But she pushed herself upwards against the wall, so that he could lay his head on her breast.

‘I'm dead,' she repeated finally in wonder, as if it explained everything.

But Gal just wept helplessly, as if, at last, all his remoteness had passed away and his heart was utterly exposed.

Deirdre had never seen him cry before. His terrible sobs were so revealing, so communicative, it was as if she had never known him before this moment. She had not fully understood what mattered to him. She had not known how much she mattered to him. She mattered so little to herself.

She tried to collect her thoughts.

‘And grandmother? She's dead too? That's true?'

‘Of course,' he said with difficulty. ‘But you died almost a year before her. Her funeral was on your anniversary. That was today.'

Deirdre had a sudden memory of the funeral. She had been there. But no one had taken any notice of her. Now she knew why. Then she felt confused.

‘Are you dead?'

‘No!' he said. And he said it as if it were the saddest thing in the world.

Poor, poor Gal. Now she understood. Now she realised what his life must be. She did not feel sorry for herself, but she felt sorry, heart-rendingly sorry, for him. It was easier to be dead than to mourn the dead. Of that she had no doubt.

‘How did I die?' she asked him gently.

‘You fell. From a hole. In the building. In the middle of the night. Some extensions your grandmother had begun – and then changed her mind about . . . The tradesmen had forgotten to put the barriers up when they left. No one could understand what you were doing there. But I knew. You were sleepwalking, like you did every night. And you were trying to find what we had lost. I was in hospital –'

‘You were in hospital?' Deirdre broke in.

‘Did you think I had left you? I was so worried that you thought I had left you, that you thought I wasn't coming back. But it wasn't like that at all. I wasn't walking out on you – she sent me away. Purely by will! If only, if only I could have fought her! But her will was too strong for me. And then I collapsed, and I couldn't get out of hospital. I couldn't even walk. When you died, my chest began to bleed. No one could find out what was wrong with me. They thought it was self-harm. But it's not self-harm. It's a mystic wound. It's been bleeding ever since.

‘This last year has been –' He stopped and shook his head. ‘There just aren't words, Deirdre, to tell you what it's felt like to be in the world without you. Sometimes it's been more than I thought I could bear. There hasn't been a second when I haven't been thinking of you. When I sleep I dream of you. But I don't sleep much. And when I'm awake I can't bear to think that you were alone, that maybe you thought I wasn't coming back, that maybe you thought I didn't love you, that you died thinking that.

‘And I loved you so much. I loved you so much I can't live without you.

‘I knew you were still here. That's why I came back. Because I knew you needed help. And I knew I could help you, once your grandmother was dead.

‘But also – also because I've nowhere to go. It's like I said before. I'm suspended, Deirdre – between life and death. I don't belong anywhere. Not in life, not without you. But not in here, either, not among the dead, although I can't keep away. I can't sleep, I can't eat, I have nightmares. It's like purgatory. God, god, god, if only I was dead. If only I belonged with you. Or if only you were alive again.

‘But you see, we can't have done what we just did. It can't have been real. Humans and ghosts can't –'

Just then there was a sound. They both looked up, expecting the walls to collapse on them at last. But the sound wasn't plaster falling, or wood splitting, or bricks collapsing.

It was rain. Not outside. Inside. It was raining inside the building.

It was raining inside Corbenic.