Voices in the Dark (30 page)

I stood for several seconds in silence. Then I went back into the shop, bolted the door, and opened the envelope.

Inside was a page, handwritten, with
FINAL DEMAND
stamped across the top. I raised it to the lamplight. It was a short note to the effect that our rent had been raised without notice, and as a result, we must ‘either find the requisite monies or vacate the premises’. The new rent was five times what it had been. The requisite monies totalled three thousand crowns.

I threw the letter into the stove. It was not only that he was turning us out of the shop. It was the way he was doing it. The way he covered his tracks so that he would look like an honest man. And what cut to my heart most bitterly was that the whole thing was my fault.

When I went upstairs, my mother was lying very still, her hand resting on her stomach. The fire had gone out; a drift of snow down the chimney had drowned it altogether. ‘Are you all right?’ I said.

‘Yes, I’m fine.’

‘You don’t look it. Mother, what’s wrong?’

Jasmine was trying to light the fire. I took the matches from her. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Let me do it.’The draughts were so strong in the room that I had no choice. Jasmine took the match and frowned at it, and the flame straightened and caught the wet coals.

‘You know what Uncle said … about using your powers for things like that …’ my mother murmured.

‘You look so ill,’ I said. She did not answer but just lay there, looking grey and sick. I rested my hand on her forehead. It was feverish, in spite of the cold.

‘Anselm, you’re shaking,’ she said. ‘Why are you shaking?’

‘I’m not.’

‘You are. Look at me.’

It was the first time I had met her eyes, and she started. ‘What happened to your face?’

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I broke my tooth at school.’

‘Are you hurt?’

‘No. It’s just one tooth.’

‘Is that all? Are you certain?’

‘Mama, I’m more worried about you,’ I said. ‘Shall I go for Father Dunstan?’

‘I don’t want to trouble him.’

Footsteps came up the stairs at that moment, and we all glanced round. ‘It’s only me,’ said my grandmother, approaching the door. ‘Why are you burning so much coal? It’s like a Christmas bonfire in here. I wonder you can afford it.’

My mother fell back on the pillows and let out a groan that my grandmother surely must have heard. It did not deter her. She came in and scolded and fussed until Jasmine went stamping to her room in tears. But in the end, my grandmother’s arrival was what decided things. She would not listen to my mother’s protests. She found the midwife’s old address, crumpled under a pile of letters in the desk in the back room, and told me to go and fetch her.

The midwife lived in an apartment like ours, at the top of a house on Paradise Way. She came with me at once, throwing her shawl about her shoulders. ‘Who is treating your mother?’ she asked as we walked. ‘Is it Doctor West? Or Doctor Sarah Law, I suppose, if you live on Trader’s Row.’

‘No one,’I said. ‘I mean, the priest comes to see us if we are ill, but no one else.’

She frowned and asked me nothing else the rest of the
way home. She was a small woman and younger than my mother, and she had grown shabbier since Jasmine was born, but there was something of my grandmother about her; perhaps that was why my grandmother approved. She ushered Jasmine and me back into the stairwell as the midwife came in, then closed the door on us.

‘Come on,’ I said. I took Jasmine’s hand, and we trailed down to the back room.

‘Why can’t we stay?’ said Jasmine, kicking the stove. ‘It’s my brother.’

‘Jasmine, come away from there,’ I said. I began boiling water for tea. ‘Tell me about your day at school.’

‘I don’t want to talk about my stupid day at school. I already told you about it.’

‘Did you practise your play? You didn’t tell me that.’

‘Be quiet, Anselm. Let me listen.’

I fell silent. We could hear their voices above us, but not the words. ‘I wish Papa was here,’ whispered Jasmine.

‘Yes.’

‘I’m worried about him.’

‘I know, Jas.’

I tried to hear their voices again, but it was no good. ‘But he will be all right,’ I said. ‘He always is. Papa is luckier than he looks.’

I had thought that would make her smile, but it didn’t. ‘The thing I’m worried about with Papa,’ she said, kneeling in front of the stove so that its light shone in her grey eyes, ‘is that he doesn’t …’ She looked up at me earnestly. ‘He doesn’t want to live.’

‘Doesn’t want to live?’ I said.

‘Yes. He’s not like you and me and Mama. He doesn’t want anything for himself. So he needs to be with his
family, because otherwise what does he have any more? He doesn’t care about being all right like everyone else does.’

‘So what do you think we should do, Jas?’ I said, with the sinking truth in my heart that she was right. ‘If you tell me what to do, I’ll listen, but I don’t see what—’

‘We can go to Holy Island,’ she said. ‘We can go and find him. That’s what we can do.’

She was gazing up at me, waiting for a response. I could tell she had been saving up this question. I shook my head. ‘Mama is ill now. It’s a long journey.’

‘How long?’

‘Two days or more.’

‘When the baby is born, we could go.’

‘But when the baby is born …’

‘I know. Anything might happen.’ Jasmine poked the coals in the stove disconsolately. ‘Anselm, when will Michael write to you and tell you his address so we can send him a letter? Everyone goes away. Aldebaran and then Michael and then Papa. When will Michael write?’

‘I don’t know!’ I said.

‘Don’t shout at me.’

‘I wasn’t shouting,’ I said, too loudly. But I felt beleaguered by her questions, and my tooth still ached, and in pieces in the stove was a demand for three thousand crowns we had no way of paying. We fell into silence again. But I did not want to listen to their voices above us, not knowing what they said. ‘Here,’ I told Jasmine, picking up her copy of
The Beggar King
from the sideboard. ‘Let’s practise your play.’

‘I don’t want to,’ she said.

‘Go on. I want to hear how it’s going.’

‘No.’

‘Please. It will make the time pass faster.’

She began reluctantly. I took all the other parts. While we were still reading, my grandmother appeared. ‘You can come back in now,’ she said. The midwife passed us on the stairs and went out by the side door. My mother was lying on the sofa under blankets, tears rolling down her cheeks. ‘What is it?’ I said, and alarm began to constrict my throat.

‘The baby is not well,’ she said. ‘It is much too small.’

‘Maria.’ My grandmother gave a quick sigh. ‘I have told you already – I’m sure it is nothing to worry about. The midwife said this was a normal winter fever.’

‘But that it could be dangerous. That’s what she said. It could be dangerous because the baby is small! And I have to give up work, and how will we pay the rent then, and I’m so afraid—’ My mother’s voice rose and choked her.

Jasmine reached out and tried to brush the tears from her face. I could think of nothing to say. I felt like it was filling the whole room, my helplessness, and suffocating me and everyone in it.

‘But it will be all right?’ I said at last. ‘Won’t it, Mother?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You will be all right?’ I said.

She did not answer. Jasmine started to cry too.

‘Of course it will,’ said my grandmother. ‘Maria, this is an overreaction.’

We sat dismally in front of the fire, my mother lying very still on the sofa, with the tears leaking occasionally from her eyes. Jasmine kept trying to bring her cups of water or read to her or bring her toast balanced shakily on a plate, until my grandmother scolded her and made her cry again. And all the time the shop stood closed, and our debts
weighed heavier. Eventually I could not stand it. ‘I am going out,’ I said.

‘Where?’ said my grandmother.

‘The markets. I want to sell a few things Leo left. I will not be long.’

I took the best jewellery out of our shop window and made the circuit of the stallholders in the new square. There was one merchant in the corner who everyone avoided, a woman who sold relics of Lucien’s regime – old army badges and paintings of war criminals and books with titles that proclaimed war and revolution. Out of desperation, I tried her; she was the richest of the stallholders now. She gave me half a crown for a chipped bracelet. ‘Good fortune to you,’ she called after me as I left. To be shown charity by a collaborator was too much. I dropped the half-crown into a beggar’s cup as soon as I reached the next street.

Carts rolled past me, piled high with people’s possessions. They were still leaving the city. In some of the streets, there were now lines of
TO LET
signs, and the houses stood locked and barred. The snow began to fall onto the grey drifts that still lay in the streets. No snow remained clean in this city; the smoke and the dust clung to it within an hour of falling. I thought about where to go. Standing in the snow, a kind of purpose came over me. It was too cold to stay still and deliberate. I started for Dr Keller’s house.

I stood for several minutes in the street outside, looking up at the black front door. Then I walked up the grand old steps and rang the bell. A maid in uniform opened it, a girl about my age. ‘I want to see the doctor,’ I told her. She disappeared, throwing her hair over her shoulder, and left me in the snow.

Police on horseback went by, the horses’ hooves falling
heavily in the slush of the road. I waited, fixing my eyes on the boot scraper at the top of the steps. It matched the plaque beside the door with the doctor’s name on it. That boot scraper was shaped like the gate of a country house, done in some brassy metal that gleamed against the snow, and there was even a little brass bird on the corner of the gate.

The maid appeared at the door again at last, and frowned at me for looking too closely at the scraper. ‘The doctor won’t see you,’ she said. ‘He is with his family, and his hours of work are over.’

‘I don’t want him to come out,’ I said. ‘I am here to talk to him.’

‘About what?’ said the housemaid, refining her high-class accent.

‘He is our landlord. There’s some mistake in the accounts. That’s all.’

‘I’m afraid I can’t fetch him.’

‘No,’ I said. She was already halfway to closing the door. ‘Listen, you have to. It won’t take long, but I want to talk to him. You have to fetch him.’

‘What is all this?’ said the doctor, appearing behind the maid in the hallway. He regarded me in silence for a moment, then stepped out the door and pulled it closed behind him. He had a glass of spirits in one hand. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It’s perishing cold. What is it?’

‘I came because … sir …’ I hesitated. ‘Thank you for treating my mother earlier.’

‘It was a favour to my neighbour, that’s all. Look, why are you here?’

‘That letter you gave me,’ I said. ‘This final demand.’

‘Yes. I know what it says.’

‘I think there was a mistake,’ I struggled on. ‘I mean, not a mistake, but I think …’ He watched me in silence. ‘Sir, you must know we can’t pay it. I came here to ask you to treat us fairly. The rent is five times what it was. You must know we can’t pay.’

‘Mr North, your finances are your own concern. I charge what I charge.’

‘But you must know—’

‘Look,’ he said, lowering his voice and stepping closer to me. ‘You are the boy who assaulted my son, aren’t you? Answer me.’

‘I didn’t assault him,’ I said. ‘He was the one who started it; he said things about my family he had no right to say.’

‘Listen to me very carefully,’ he said. ‘I want you off my property in the next five seconds.’

‘I’m not on your property!’ I said.

‘You are on my steps. I have seen the bruises on my son’s face, and I will be taking it up with the police.’

‘Look at my tooth, then,’ I said. ‘Look what he did to me – it’s much worse. And he said things about my father.’

‘Oh, you people are all the same,’ he said with a kind of

exasperated smile.

‘What people?’ I said. ‘What people are all the same?’

‘Goodnight.’ He slammed the door and drew the curtain across behind it.

‘What people are all the same?’ I said again. The door remained shut. No one in the house had heard. I sat down on the steps. I had not meant to say what I just had, at least not the way it came out. I had intended to reason with him, to apologize for giving John a black eye and make him see that it was not justice to raise our rent because of it. Pointless schemes drifted in and out of my mind. I thought
about walking to the palace gates and telling the guards I was a relative of Aldebaran’s and asking the king to help us. But the king’s debts were worse than ours. Dr Keller’s probably were, too, I thought. Half the wealthy in this city lived off money that was not theirs. And that made me think of Michael, because it was like something he would have said. I wondered if I really could go and find him when all this was over.

The thought passed and the snow fell harder. I got up and started down the steps.

As I went down, I heard voices laughing behind the yellow glow of the curtain. I stopped. ‘Anselm Andros?’ John Keller was saying and laughing as if his ribs would break. If I had not heard that, I might not have done what I did. It was a stupid thing to do; I knew it even at the time. I walked home and waited until everyone had gone to bed. Then I put on my overcoat and an old hat of Leo’s and covered half my face with a black scarf my mother used to wear to church. I went back to Dr Keller’s with a file and a crowbar. I dug the boot scraper out of the old concrete it stood in and prised the brass plaque with his name off the wall. It was not hard to do. Then I took them to the all-night pawnbroker’s and sold them for scrap metal. Behind the curtain, they never stopped their laughing.

I had to pass by the auction rooms to go home, and I could hear shouting and stamping from an upstairs room. I stopped and listened. I thought I would go in for a while and listen to the trading, and maybe my heart would be less restless. I was already regretting what I had just done. The clocks were striking ten, but what sounded like a packed auction was taking place inside.