The House of Sleep (26 page)

ANALYST
: You don’t think you’re exaggerating?

ANALYSAND
: No. It was worse. It was worse than any of those things.

Irresolute, Sarah waited for three more days before acting on Robert’s advice, and her own jealous impulse, by opening Veronica’s letter. She waited until Friday morning, the day of the leaving party.

She crossed the bedroom on tiptoe, even though the house, as far as she could tell, was empty, and even though she knew that Veronica wouldn’t be back all day. For a while she sat down on the bed, waiting for the courage to come to her. The weather had turned: flecks of rain speckled the window, and she could hear the waves breaking in a long, muted roar. It was eleven o’clock in the morning.

Finally she opened the desk and took out the envelope. It was franked, not stamped, and bore a London postmark. Veronica’s name and address were typed. It had been opened cleanly, with a knife, and inside was a single sheet of thick, embossed paper.

At the top was a printed letterhead, which gave the name of a well-known London merchant bank.

The letter said:

Dear Miss Stuart,

Thank you for coming to see us last Thursday. We are very pleased to offer you a position as junior dealer in our foreign exchange room, at a starting salary of £43,725 per annum, plus commission and bonuses as previously discussed.

We look forward to seeing you here at 8.30 a.m. on Monday September 3rd, and would like to offer our best wishes on the start of what we hope will be a long and profitable career in financial services.

Her first thought was that she was going to be sick. She felt the gorge rising in her throat and leaned forward, clutching her stomach, ready to run for the bathroom. But this soon passed. She replaced the letter in the drawer of Veronica’s desk and went to the window, staring out over the ocean and trying to push aside her fury, her slow-burning anger at having allowed herself to be deceived, so that she might see past it and try to remember any small detail, any potential clue which might have warned her that something like this was going to happen.

She could remember nothing. All she could remember was that she and Veronica were meant to be meeting in the Café Valladon at three o’clock that afternoon. It was to have been their last visit, but Sarah knew now that she wouldn’t go. It was no place to have an argument. It was no place to split up with someone.

12

The next morning, Terry awoke.

An ordinary enough event in the lives of most people, perhaps: but not for him. The sensation of passing from sleep to wakefulness had eluded Terry for more than a decade, and although today he could not have identified it as such with any certainty, he was at least aware, as soon as dawn began to glimmer around the edges of his bedroom’s small, thickly curtained window, that something new and exceptional had taken place. He felt profoundly refreshed, and was convinced that he had been unconscious for much longer than usual. Carefully ungluing and disentangling himself from the electrodes, he left his bedroom, waved good morning to Lorna (crouched bleary-eyed over her computer screen and habitual cup of tea) and went out on to the terrace to watch the sun rising over the headland. It was five o’clock. His brain coursed with energy, like a recharged battery; his limbs felt strong and supple; each one of his senses was primed, alert. Life had never seemed so brimful of potential.

Dr Dudden, on the other hand, did not emerge from his bedroom that morning. He had drunk far too much red wine and brandy the night before, and having slept straight through his alarm at ten past three, would remain in a deep, unwavering sleep for the next nine hours (very nearly missing the train he was scheduled to take in the afternoon). And so it was Lorna herself, her reams of computer paper billowing in the sea breeze, who came out to inform Terry that at one point during the night he had spent no fewer than eighty-seven minutes in
Stage 3 sleep: his first passage through a genuine, restful, delta-wave sleep stage.

‘You seem to be starting to normalize,’ she said. ‘I’d say that as far as your sleep patterns were concerned, you’re about to join the rest of the human race again. How do you intend to celebrate?’

‘A day trip to London, I think,’ said Terry cheerfully. ‘There’s something I have to find.’

∗

Sarah slept badly, having spent much of the night replaying in her mind the more acrimonious highlights of her telephone conversation with Alison’s mother. Their argument had ended with the promise that an official complaint about Sarah’s conduct would be lodged with her headmistress first thing tomorrow morning. Sarah was therefore not surprised to find a message waiting for her in the staff room as soon as she arrived at school.

‘I know exactly what this is about,’ she said, on entering Mrs Palmer’s office and being waved into a chair. ‘It’s Alison, isn’t it? Her mother’s been on the phone to you already.’

‘Yes. She phoned about ten minutes ago. She seemed rather agitated.’

‘What did she say?’

‘It was all a little confused and overwrought, to be honest. Something to do with your having taken Alison to see a pornographic film. Which strikes me, I have to admit, as unlikely. Perhaps I’d better hear your side of the story first.’

During the course of this speech, Sarah began to relax slightly. She remembered that Eileen Palmer had never treated her with anything other than fairness and generosity; and that, in the three years they had worked together, they had fought so many battles side by side, worked so hard to clear for each other a pathway through the new legislative and administrative jungle that had sprung up around them, that they had forged for themselves an indissoluble alliance. She
knew that if she told the truth, she had nothing to fear from her.

‘I found Alison Hill sitting by herself in Finsbury Park yesterday afternoon,’ she began. ‘I asked her what she was doing there and she said that she couldn’t go home because her mother wouldn’t be back from work until seven o’clock, and she’d lost her key to the house. In the circumstances I thought that I had no option but to take her home with me. We went to a café and after that we were walking past a cinema, and it occurred to me that she might like to go and see a film. I remembered the title of one of the films from a review in the newspaper, which had made it sound like something suitable for the whole family. It had a certificate which seemed to confirm this view. Anyway, when we got inside and the film started I found that it was extremely sexist, and very violent and… generally objectionable, on every level. So I decided that we should leave. I went to the toilet and then came back, ready to take Alison away, but she’d gone. Disappeared. Run off.’

Eileen was listening attentively. She was frowning, but it was an encouraging frown: a pucker of concentration.

‘Then what?’

‘That was when I realized that I’d been stupid. The first thing I should have found out was Alison’s address, but I didn’t have it. So I had to come all the way back here, get Derek to let me into the secretaries’ room, and look it up in the files. I phoned Alison’s home from here, and her mother answered. She’d found her sitting on the front doorstep when she got back from work – very upset, apparently. The film seemed to have disturbed her quite a lot and she cried about it for some time. So her mother gave me a bit of an earful about that and accused me of making a serious error of judgment, and I told her that she obviously wasn’t looking after her daughter properly if I’d found her wandering around a public park for three hours by herself without supervision, and it all got… quite nasty, I suppose.’

‘Well, you obviously put her on the defensive. She is, in my experience, quite a combative woman.’

‘Oh, so you have… you have met Mrs Hill?’

‘
Ms
Hill is her preferred designation, I think. Yes, she’s been to several parents’ meetings this year.’

‘And Mr – I mean, her husband, partner, whatever?’

‘No. I know nothing about him. I don’t even know if there is one.’

‘I’ve got this feeling…’ Sarah leaned forward, more confident now, feeling herself drawn in by the mystery surrounding this family. ‘I’ve got this feeling that he may be dead. That he may have died only recently.’

‘Really? What’s given you that idea?’

‘It’s just something about Alison… she seems to have this thing about death. She read out a poem she’d written in Norman’s class the other day, and it was…’

‘Morbid?’

‘Not morbid so much as – well, desolate. It was about a star dying and turning into a black hole and leaving the other stars feeling bereft and lonely. And then yesterday, I caught her carrying a mouse in her satchel. A dead mouse. She’d found it on the playing fields and said she wanted to take it home and bury it.’

‘That does tend to support your hypothesis,’ said Eileen. She was prone, occasionally, to these rather dry formulations. Now she looked at her watch and rose to her feet: it was almost time for morning assembly. ‘Well, Sarah, I shall be writing to Ms Hill this afternoon, to tell her that I’ve looked into her complaint and I’m satisfied that my staff behaved properly on this occasion.’

‘Thank you.’

‘I’d have been very surprised to find otherwise, in your case.’ She smiled warmly. ‘At the same time, it might be a good idea if you tried to patch things up with her yourself. Especially if it gives you a chance to satisfy our mutual curiosity about the family.’

‘You mean…’ Sarah decided to risk an irreverence: ‘You mean I should turn up at the house and have a nose around?’

‘Something like that,’ said Eileen, and ushered Sarah into the corridor, already thronged by children making their shrill, erratic way towards the assembly hall.

∗

Sarah had arrived at Rebecca Hill’s house that evening armed with prejudices: class prejudices, mainly, because it had never occurred to her that a woman who adopted (in her view) such a cavalier approach to childcare would be so prosperous. She had braced herself for something like squalor, and instead was confronted by all the hallmarks of middle-class taste. As she waited, alone, in Rebecca’s sitting-room, her initial surprise quickly gave way to self-reproach; following which, another, even more unexpected sensation began to steal over her. She realized that she was beginning to feel at home – more thoroughly at home than she had ever felt in her own house, since Anthony walked out – and couldn’t understand why. She had, after all, only been sitting there for a few minutes, waiting for Rebecca to reappear with the wine that had been frostily, grudgingly offered once Sarah had introduced herself and the shock of her appearance on the doorstep had been assimilated. Surely it was absurd to be feeling so very much at home in a stranger’s house, within such a short space of time, when that stranger appeared to be in a substantially higher income bracket than herself, and when she was anticipating, besides, an extremely difficult conversation. None the less, there was something about the furnishings, the paintwork, the pictures on the walls, the play of light from the French windows on to the carpet, the rows of hardback books, the vases of gypsophila and delphinium, which instilled in Sarah a blanketing, if inexplicable, sense of familiarity and reassurance. She even wondered, for a moment, if she was experiencing
déjà vu
, or if she might have seen this room years ago in one of her all-too-vivid dreams. But she thought not. The explanation for her strange, pleasurable sense of homecoming
(there was no other word for it) lay somewhere deeper.

‘It’s only from Sainsbury’s, I’m afraid,’ said Rebecca, presenting her, in an offhand way, with a glass of greenish-yellow Australian wine. ‘Alison’s upstairs doing her homework. I could ask her down, but perhaps we’d better thrash this out by ourselves.’

Sarah was alarmed at the thought of thrashing anything out with this woman. She had already noticed the collection of legal textbooks on the shelves and had guessed that Rebecca must be a barrister. She took three rapid, nervous sips of the wine.

‘Why exactly are you here?’ Rebecca now asked, bluntly. ‘I made my complaint to your headmistress this morning. I would have thought the matter rests with her.’

Sarah half-laughed, half-gasped at the audacity of this gambit. ‘Well, she doesn’t seem to think so, and to be honest neither do I.
We’re
rather more concerned about the fact that I found your daughter sitting in Finsbury Park yesterday afternoon, locked out of her house, with nowhere safe to go for nearly four hours.’

Rebecca sighed. ‘Look, I’m as upset about that as anybody. It should never have happened. I had to be out of London on a case, and Alison told me that she was going to be watching the sports until after five o’clock. I thought she could walk home with some of her friends, and let herself in. Then the silly girl goes and loses her key.’ In an undertone, as if to herself, she added: ‘Much as she seems to lose everything at the moment.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Sarah, ‘but that isn’t good enough. For one thing I’m not sure that Alison
has
any friends at school, to be honest. She doesn’t seem to be very good at making them. And it doesn’t surprise me that she loses things all the time, because she’s obviously going through a very unhappy and vulnerable period.’

‘Putting aside the pop psychology,’ said Rebecca crisply, ‘I’d love to know how that fits in with your decision to make
her sit through a film which sounds violent and unpleasant enough to upset any girl of her age.’

Her voice had risen in both pitch and volume. Sarah had no wish for the confrontation to grow so heated, so early.

‘This isn’t – or shouldn’t be – about blame,’ she said. ‘We’re both interested in Alison’s welfare, so let’s not forget that we’re on the same side really. Having said that –’ and here she allowed a steelier note to insinuate itself ‘– I need an assurance from you that this isn’t going to happen again. Otherwise I’m going to have to report it.’

‘Yes, of course.’ This was agreed testily, without grace, and Rebecca immediately followed it up with: ‘And I’d like you to think a little more carefully before inflicting any more… unsuitable entertainments on my daughter.’