Woman in the Mirror

  Well, all marriage, all love, was a risk. You either had the courage or you did not. As she walked she tried to dredge up from her subconscious the one other very definite element contributing to her reluctance to commit herself. It was something to do with Cader Morb or Morb House or the people living there. She wanted something resolved. There were questions in her mind that had to be answered – and they were not only in her mind but in her heart. They had to be resolved before she could move to the resolution of her feelings for Christopher.

  It was to do with Simon, really. No one else in the house but only Simon. Sometimes he seemed to be more in her thoughts than Christopher. He was the crux. She realized that now.

  In some way now she was involved personally – almost as if she were Marion come back from the dead – or as if Marion, or a part of Marion, now inhabited her. She wondered if the wayward spirit that came to sit upon her old rocking-horse had found a new home, in the person of the woman who was inhabiting her room and so closely resembled her. Had Simon recognized more than a resemblance when they first met? Had he wanted her to leave, perceiving already the extent of the possession?

  She kicked impatiently at a stone. Old wives’ talk. She was free to leave tomorrow, unencumbered by any entanglement here. The only involvement was her own curiosity. Apart from Simon. The only compulsion was her own determination and choice. Apart from Simon.

  On the way back an occasional great drop splashed on her head or shoulders. She was wearing a fine cardigan, and the drops went through it and were cold on her skin. Yet as she neared the house she felt again a reluctance to go in. In spite of all scepticism, it was as if here outside she were mistress of her own thoughts, once indoors the heavy atmosphere of the house closed on her like a damp cloud about a hill, cloying, misting, distorting, putting the most familiar object out of shape, leaving the simplest judgment in doubt.

  Althea was waiting for her on the front doorstep, just as she had been when she first arrived.

  ‘Hullo, pet. Been a walk?’ She looped at her handsome hair. ‘I wasn’t looking for you, though it’s nice to see you. I’ve such a headache. I suppose it may be the weather.’

  ‘Would you like me to get you something?’

  ‘Thank you. There are aspirins in my bedroom. In the first drawer of the dressing-table. If it’s not too much trouble.’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Did you see a man on a bicycle down the valley? It’s time the Sunday papers were here.’

  II

  By lunch the day was so dark that they had the lamps lit. Simon, they said, was painting in his room. Mr Croome-Nichols retired soon after for his usual siesta, and Gregory began to practise Schubert. Althea Syme was surrounded by Sunday papers, so Norah slipped away into the hall.

  Doole was there, lighting a lamp.

  ‘Oh, Doole,’ she said, ‘where do these doors lead?’ pointing to two at the opposite side behind the stairs.

  He looked up, bold eyes carefully impersonal. ‘It’s a part of the house that’s not used, miss. Madam finds it too big to keep it all up.’

  She went to one of the doors and tried to open it. It was locked.

  ‘Do you have the key?’

  ‘Well, yes, miss. But there’s nothing to see, like. It’s all dusty.’

  ‘I’d like to explore.’

  ‘Did Madam . . . ?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Reluctantly he came across with a bunch of keys, stepped past her. He smelt of after-shave lotion.

  ‘There, miss. Do you want a light?’

  ‘No . . . It seems lighter in here.’

  ‘Careful of the floorboards, miss. Some of ’em are a bit shaky.’

  ‘Thank you, Doole. Don’t bother to wait. I’ll find my own way out.’

  It was in fact lighter in here because of the lack of curtains. She was in a hall similar to the one she had left. It was unfurnished and uncarpeted. She went across to the other side and opened a door into a large sitting-room, also empty, though one or two pictures hung on the walls. It smelt stale and dusty and mildewed, and she wondered whether, if she owned Morb House, she would be happy to have these rooms left untended. Wood beetle? Damp? Dry rot? Better to pull it down.

  This window looked out at the back, and she peered through the dirty pane at the weather. It had not rained at all. Every hour or so the great scattered drops would fall, staining leaf and stone like thin blood, but then it would pass away. The white and grey cauliflowers of cloud still grew one on another and manoeuvred for position; the mountains were hardly to be seen; thunder rumbled distantly but never came nearer. It was all like the overture to a piece of grand opera on which the curtain failed to rise. Just at present the light was a sulphur yellow, such as Norah associated with the tall chimneys of industry rather than the open countryside.

  She looked in another room, but there was nothing much to see. Dust on her fingers, she went up the bony uncarpeted stairs. At the top she tried to remember how the occupied part of the house was laid out and reverse it. There was the same broad landing, with three bedroom doors and a flight of steps down to the bathrooms, but only one passage leading off. She stumbled into a derelict boxroom, found two doors locked, went along the passage and looked out of another room towards the front. There was a flicker of lightning – the first in all the day. As a child she had been scared to death by her mother’s story of the girl who watched a thunderstorm out of a window and when she was struck by lightning the impression of her face was left on the glass. The story had remained with her all her life. One thing, if she ever had children she would never stain their minds with unnecessary fears. As she moved away from the window she saw the other flight of stairs going up, corresponding to her own flight in the next house. Perhaps there were corresponding rooms up here – how silly never to have looked when she was out of doors. But had she not glanced up more than once and seen no other windows except her own?

  It was dark going up, and halfway she saw why. The heavy oaken door at the top was shut. She climbed the rest of the stairs and pushed at the door. It was locked and there was no key. A tap was dripping somewhere. Bad that that should be left – didn’t they ever get frost?

  She pushed at the door again, very curious now to see more. But nothing would budge it. She decided tomorrow when the light was better to get the key from Doole and see what was up here.

  She descended to the first landing but as she was about to go down again she stopped and looked at the upper stairs. There was dust here and there, but the handrail looked free of it.

  Thunder leaned and thumped over the house and she was suddenly scared. She turned and pattered down the next flight, chose the wrong door to leave the empty house and found it locked, thought for a moment Doole had locked her in, and then saw the right door.

  She slipped through. Gregory was still playing Schubert.

  III

  It was still only three o’clock. Althea was nowhere about, and Norah picked over the Sunday papers for ten minutes. The heaviness of the weather had given her a headache too. She decided to go up to her room and lie on the bed for a while, maybe take an aspirin. She borrowed one of the less staid of the Sunday papers and went upstairs, conscious that she was now repeating something she had done half an hour ago in the other part of the house.

  It was lighter in her room than downstairs and vaguely less airless. She took the aspirin and lay down, rustling quickly through the paper. It was the usual dredging up of the week’s bad news, a couple of scandals the paper was supposed to be unearthing, football results. She dropped the paper over the edge of the bed and closed her eyes. Almost at once she went to sleep.

  She dreamed she was in this bed and just waking out of a deep sleep. She climbed reluctantly out of bed and went to the long mirror to comb her hair. But in the mirror she saw Marion, who was just like herself except that she wore a trench coat and brown felt hat, from the brim of which rain was dripping. They stared at each other and then Marion said: ‘We nev
er left the house that night. We never went to the sea. We never left the house that night at all.’ And then it looked as if the splashes of rain from her hat were like the splashes of rain that had fallen this morning, so big and so heavy that they looked like thin blood. Norah was looking at Marion but at the same time looking into a room that was not her own. The door opened behind Marion and a man came in carrying a heavy iron bar . . .

  She jerked awake, started up, looked round.

  All was as it had been before – her own room, the familiar chairs and table and mirror, her frock hung over the back of a chair, her slippers by the bed, the newspaper in a ruffled pyramid where she had dropped it. A distant rumble said the thunder was not all spent. She looked at her watch. Twenty minutes to four. She listened but it was ticking. She could only have been asleep ten minutes.

  There might be nothing to old-fashioned beliefs in possession, but there was plenty in theories of suggestion – particularly auto-suggestion. At this rate she was going to hypnotize herself into a state where she believed she was Marion, had lived here all her life, that this was her bedroom, next door her playroom, Simon her brother.

  She lay back, breathed out, then trailed a hand over the bed for the newspaper. There was trouble in the Berlin corridor, elections in Italy, meat prices were rising, there had been riots at a film star’s funeral. She dropped the paper again and closed her eyes. And then she heard the tapping.

  It was the first time it had ever happened in the daytime, and she tried to believe it was still part of the dream. Not so. She lay there listening.

  It stopped and then began again. Someone trying to attract her attention? Or Something? Her heart began to beat.

  She got up slowly, put her feet in her slippers, remained seated on the edge of the bed. The sound definitely came from her sitting-room. She stood up, picked her frock from the back of the chair, stepped into it, zipped it up.

  The zip stuck. In her haste she had caught a piece of the lining. She struggled with fumbling fingers, could not move it up or down. The tapping had stopped. She went to the mirror, craned her neck to look at her back, half afraid of seeing Marion. It was only a tiny piece of material. She forced the zip down, pulled it up more carefully. As she changed hands to finish the zip the tapping began again.

  She took a deep breath, stared at herself taking the breath. Norah Faulkner. Not Marion Syme. Norah Faulkner, born in Twickenham twenty-three years ago. Educated here and there during the war. Came to this house less than a week ago. Never seen it before. Never heard of Marion Syme. Quite separate. This is my identity, no one else’s. I am sane, healthy and sceptical. I do not believe in ghosts, hauntings, possessions, old houses that carry the impress of long-dead people or rooms where evil things roam.

  So there is nothing in my sitting-room, and if there is a noise, I must go in and find the cause, which must be a natural cause.

  It was so dark that she turned to light the lamp, but then she checked herself. Not such a coward. It wasn’t that dark. She could see perfectly well across the room. She would be able to see the whole of the sitting-room without the aid of a lamp.

  She went to the closed door, turned the handle and pushed it open, went sharply in.

  It was darker in here because the window was smaller. As she entered the room the tapping stopped, but the sound had definitely come from the wall behind the rocking-horse. In the yellow-grey light from the window the room looked like a painting by Sickert, seedy, dark-shadowed, indefinably neglected and sad. A still life in which only one thing moved. And this time there was no lamp in hand to give her the illusion that the fault might be hers. The rocking-horse was moving.

  At least an inch each way. At least an inch. With dry throat she forced herself to go towards it. A grey dusty old horse, with straggling mane and thin grey tail, the saddle worn with use, the paint rubbed off the rump, the stirrups tarnished, the rockers kicked and scarred. But no one rode it. No one visible rode it.

  She put a cold hand out and touched the head. The movement stopped. She stood watching. It did not restart. She waited. The horse was absolutely still, as quiet as the rest of the room, as still as the day. There was no more knocking. She had stopped it. She had interrupted the children’s play.

  She took another breath. She couldn’t leave it like this. Not again. The wall behind the rocking-horse was the farthest from her bedroom, possibly backed on to the locked rooms in the other part of the house. The wallpaper, as she had noticed before, was a slightly different pattern from the rest of the room, a piece of it bulged as if the wall behind had warped.

  She went up and felt it. The paper was a little loose but the wall firm behind.

  She went back into her bedroom and fetched a pair of nail scissors. With these she began to pick at the paper. It cut easily enough and she pulled it away in strips. There was another older paper behind it. She stabbed at this and it also came away, revealing the cracked plaster and the brick behind. There seemed no advantage but she nervily went on, tearing the paper down in strips so that the wall soon was striped like a faded zebra.

  Presently she paused for breath and stood back. You couldn’t attack a brick wall. If anything was behind that wall it was beyond her reach. Short of a pick-axe. She knelt down and began to gather up the shreds of torn wallpaper, rolling them into a dry crackling pile. Then she noticed that the skirting board here had come loose, perhaps with damp. She put her fingers behind it and it squeaked slowly away. Behind it was more brick, but here the brick was loose.

  In the tiny firegrate was a poker. She fetched it and began to work on the nearest brick. But work was an overstatement. It came away easily into her hand and left a gap. She put her hand in but there was no brick beyond, only a slight draught. Whatever was beyond was a single partition away.

  Half a dozen bricks came easily. Either the mortar had dried too soon or the mixture had been wrong. It crumbled like crusty sand. Another dozen came and she rebuilt them in a pyramid behind her and looked speculatively at the wall. Her knees were sore and she stood up and dusted her stockings. One was laddered. The air coming through the gap she had made was even dustier and staler than the room she was in.

  There was a flicker of lightning over the hills. Her throat was very dry and she had no saliva to swallow. She went back to the wall.

  Once the paper was stripped off you could almost lift the bricks away. Even those she had supposed firm were only really held by the pressure of those around. To save the risk of a fall she worked more narrowly upwards. Soon she could peer in.

  It was a room, almost in darkness, and the floorboards ran through continuously from her own sitting-room. It seemed to be furnished. There was a big square object in the middle, and piled boards against the walls. But no window, or no visible window. There was another door at the opposite side, and through the cracks in this a few thin glints of light penetrated.

  She worked until there was a space about four feet high by three feet wide. Not caring about the dust and the dirt, she crawled cautiously through, feeling with her hands along the floor to make sure the floorboards were secure. When she was almost through her hand came into contact with some hair.

  Disbelief sometimes interposes itself between the recognizing sense and the recognition. It did now. Her mind took every evasive action of supposing it some kind of wool, of tissue, of meshed cotton. Then still incredulous, groping, conviction rising like bile, she extended her hand and felt the shape of the head, the cold brow . . .

  She gave a choking scream and scrambled to her feet in the dark sour attic, banging her shoulder as she straightened up. Blood beating, draining, she clawed at the wall and the opening behind her to try to escape.

  But then the door of the dark attic opened and light flooded in. A man stood on the threshold, silhouetted in the grey afternoon light. She did not need to be told it was Simon.

  He came a step into the room.

  ‘Marion! So you have dropped the – the pretence at last . . .’
br />   CHAPTER TEN

  I

  Don’t faint. Can’t faint. Must not look down. Not look at what is on the floor. Keep away. Get out. Back out. But one has to bend, to squeeze –

  He was beside her. ‘Marion! Are you not well? Oh, my love, my love.’

  His hands were on her, arms around her. She could not fight, her knees like water. He put his hands on either side of her face and kissed her. It was a long, slow, loving kiss, exploring her lips, and she gasped and could not move.

  Suddenly she was standing alone, reeling against the wall. He had jerked away, released her as if he had been shot.

  ‘Oh, dear Christ, what am I thinking of?’ he said. ‘Why’ve you come to torment me like this?’

  Her senses were going now. She must not. ‘Simon, leave me, let me – go.’

  ‘You should have gone when I warned you!’ he shouted. ‘The devil himself couldn’t have thought up a nastier trick! What’s the matter? Damn you, are you ill? Why have you broken through like this?’

  She sagged, head reeling, into his arms, though she dreaded them more than anything; yet unable to stand; he half led, half carried her; but away from her own room, towards the next room beyond the attic, the way he had come. She tried to resist, to get back to her own room, to escape, but presently she was lying on a couch in this second room, hair hanging, lips white, eyes smudged with horror.

  ‘Here, drink this, it’s only water, but . . .’

  She sipped something he had brought, liquid spilling down her chin. He wiped it from her neck. The room kept coming and going, like adjusting a telescope.

  He lifted her feet and put them on the couch. Presently the room began to steady. Head back, she looked at him peering down at her. It was an artist’s studio, the light from big fanlights high up. The fanlights showed a copper sky and diamond stars of rain.

  Abruptly he turned away, put his hands to his eyes. ‘My God, you are her and not her! It’s been a torture ever since I came. Now . . . now, not content with that, you break through the damned wall! What’s the matter with you? Are you mad?’