Possession

  ‘A prayer?’ She blinked, and felt herself blushing. ‘Yes – er – thank you,’ she said, awkwardly.

  The curate closed his eyes and they said the Lord’s Prayer. He then continued into more prayers and she sat, with her eyes tightly shut; it seemed strange, just the two of them in her drawing room, but when she opened her eyes again, she felt stronger, comforted.

  ‘Would you like me to visit you again?’

  ‘Please, whenever you are passing.’

  He left, almost as if he was in a hurry to get away, she thought; something had changed in him the moment she had mentioned spiritualism, some concern that she had been unable to allay.

  She closed the front door and walked back down the hallway. The light was still on down the stairs to the darkroom, and she wondered whether to go and look again at the photographs. No, she decided, she would look in the morning, in the daylight, when she was rested and her eyes were not playing tricks. She sighed; some time she would have to tackle Fabian’s room, do something with his clothes, his belongings. She wondered, suddenly, if he had made a will.

  She went upstairs into his bedroom and turned on the light. The room seemed very peaceful, almost welcoming. His slippers by the bed, laid out by Mimsa; silly Mimsa, she thought with a smile. Mimsa had taken it badly; violent floods of emotion, the best way to get grief out, she knew, envious for a moment of Mimsa’s simplicity, of her Latin temperament. She wished that sometimes she too could let her emotion go.

  She looked up at the stern portrait on the wall, and Fabian’s cold eyes stared down; she shuddered. ‘Don’t look like that, darling,’ she said. She closed her eyes. ‘Oh, God, look after my darling Fabian; protect him wherever he is.’ She opened them again and her eyes were wet. She sat down on the bed and sobbed, gently.

  Then she stood up, looked at the framed photograph of a Jaguar sports car on the wall and the huge stylized coloured posters of old cars, racing. She looked at his books, rows and rows of science fiction, astronomy. She looked at the telescope set up at the window, that David had given him for his sixteenth birthday. She walked over, removed the lens cap and looked through it. She could remember Fabian patiently pointing out the stars to her, the Bear, the Plough, Uranus, Jupiter, he knew them all. She could never really be sure which was which; she even had difficulty in recognizing the Plough. She stared at the stars now. They looked huge. She wondered if Fabian was up there, somewhere, among them.

  She opened a drawer and rummaged through his socks, lurid greens, yellows, pinks; he always wore bright socks. Something caught her eye at the bottom of the drawer, and she moved the socks aside. It was a postcard depicting a long red-brick building with shops and an outdoor café. The Quincy Markets, Boston, Mass. There were more cards underneath, all of different scenes of Boston: the river, M.I.T., Harvard University, the harbour, ‘Scene of the historic Boston Tea Party’, she read. Strange, she thought, he’d never been to the States, never even talked about it; why the postcards at the bottom of the drawer, almost as if he had been hiding them?

  She slept with the light on that night, as she had done when she was a child. It would go in time; as the curate had said, the wounds would heal. She slept for a while then woke up, stared at the green glow of her clock, and lay with a sense of dread, covered in pins and needles listening to the silence of the night. She looked up at the ceiling, then across at the wall, at Fabian’s room.

  She saw the words on the VDU. Fabian’s face staring from the photograph.

  She closed her eyes tightly, tried to shut them out, tried to shut out everything.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  It was drizzling as Alex drove over the Cam, the same as it had been when she had driven Fabian up for the start of his first term. It was strange, she thought, the odd details she could remember. The car crammed full of his luggage. Their conversation. ‘Had any more thoughts about what you want to do after Cambridge, darling?’

  He had stared ahead as if brooding. ‘No,’ he had replied, flatly, but a little too quickly.

  She realized the curate had been right; one knew very little about one’s children, however much they hugged you, gave you roses and could sense your own moods. She remembered the day she had told Fabian she and David were separating. ‘I’ve known you would for years, Mother,’ he had said, walking over and kissing her, this strange tall thin son, stronger now than when he had been a child with his weak chest and his fearful rages and his strange dark brooding moods and the hours he would spend in his room with the door locked.

  She walked around the quadrangle, listening to the echo of her footsteps, up the stone staircase, along the corridor and found room 35. She was nervous, she realized suddenly, nervous of knocking on the door.

  It opened almost instantly, and she jumped.

  ‘Hallo, Mrs Hightower,’ said Otto.

  Why did he always have to sound as if he was mocking, she wondered? She stared up at his brooding, menacing face, made all the more satanic by the cuts and bruising and his strange eyes, smiling, like a pair of conspirators, two hideous cold mocking objects. Had this really been her son’s best friend?

  ‘Hallo, Otto, how are you?’ she said, gently.

  ‘Oh, I’m fine, Mrs Hightower. Would you like some coffee?’ She noticed the lilt of German that just took the knife-edge off his Eton accent; she could not work out whether he was trying to accentuate or obscure it.

  ‘Thank you.’

  He poured some coffee beans into an electric grinder, laid out the pot, the cups, the milk, as if performing a ritual.

  ‘This is very nice, Otto, I thought most students only knew how to make instant.’ She looked around the room.

  ‘Most students probably do.’

  There were few clues about his personality in the battered undergraduate furniture, the bare walls, the rows of books, mostly scientific. There were piles of papers and clothes strewn untidily around. A couple of empty bottles of champagne lay by the wastepaper basket. ‘How are you feeling now, Otto?’

  ‘Feeling?’

  She nodded. ‘Emotionally.’

  He shrugged, put a cigarette in his mouth and lit it. ‘Would you like one?’

  She shook her head. ‘I hope you don’t feel guilty.’

  ‘Guilty?’

  ‘Yes. That you – you know – survived.’

  ‘I don’t feel guilty.’

  The coffee pot hissed and spat.

  ‘Maybe I will have one,’ she said. He handed her the pack. ‘I don’t think it’s fair that three young boys were killed by a drunk.’ She leaned forward and took the light Otto held out. ‘A sad drunk.’

  ‘Perhaps it was meant, Mrs Hightower.’

  ‘Meant?’ She drew on the cigarette. ‘Meant that they should be taken or that you should have survived?’

  He raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Tell me,’ she said, and paused, feeling silly. ‘At the funeral, when I thanked you for coming, you said that Fabian had asked you to come. What did you mean?’

  Otto leaned against the window-sill and looked down at the quadrangle.

  She stared at him, realizing what he must be going through, and said nothing; she sipped her coffee and tapped the ash off her cigarette. ‘Was Fabian happy here at Cambridge, Otto?’

  ‘Happy? I don’t know how you tell if anyone is happy?’ He turned and gave a strange, leering smile.

  ‘I got the feeling he enjoyed it here; he liked you and Charles very much.’

  Otto shrugged.

  ‘I think he was very fond of Carrie too. He brought her home a couple of times; I didn’t really think she was right for him. All the same, I was sorry when he ditched her. In a funny way, she was quite good for him.’

  ‘Ditched her?’ Otto marched across the room and stubbed his cigarette out in the ashtray. ‘He didn’t ditch Carrie, she ditched him. She went off to find herself in America.’

  Alex smiled wryly. ‘Children never tell their parents much, do they?’

  ‘That depends o
n the parents,’ said Otto.

  The tone of his voice made Alex feel uncomfortable. ‘I thought Fabian and I had a close relationship.’ She shrugged and stared out through the grimy window at the grey sky; the springs in the armchair were tilting her slightly over to one side, and as she moved there was a loud twang beneath her. ‘He told me that he’d given her up – I suppose he was embarrassed – felt it might be bad for his ego to admit he’d been ditched; one thing he never had any problems with was girls.’

  ‘Why do you say that Mrs Hightower?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He was always having problems with girls.’

  ‘What sort of problems?’

  ‘I’d rather not say.’ He smiled, a curious private smile to himself. She looked at his eyes, puzzled, but they gave nothing away. ‘I’ll take you to his room.’

  ‘It’s next door isn’t it?’

  Otto nodded.

  ‘I’ll go on my own first, if you don’t mind. If there’s anything of his that you’d like – books, whatever, please take them.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  She felt nothing as she walked into Fabian’s room; it could have been the room of a total stranger. It was chilly, damp, and smelt of old furniture. She stared at the thin carpet with the floorboards showing through in patches, the single bar electric heater and the grill for toasting sandwiches which she had given him. She looked at the rows of decanters on the mantelpiece. One was half full; she removed the top and sniffed. There was a musty sweetness that reminded her of liquorice; port, she thought. Wine racks were piled against the wall, with dusty necks of bottles poking out here and there. Near the floor were several bottles grouped together, their necks wrapped smartly in gold foil, with orange bands around their necks. She leaned down to read the writing, Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin.

  There were some papers on the desk, held down by a biro, and she looked at them. ‘Were Goneril and Regan evil? Or just practical businesswomen? Was Shakespeare trying to tell us all something, centuries before his time? Had the Business Woman of the Year Award existed in Elizabethan times, could they have won it?’ Alex smiled. She remembered Fabian discussing this with her only a few weeks ago; she could picture him clearly, walking around the kitchen, hand in his jeans pocket, firing questions at her.

  She looked around; it seemed almost as if he had just popped out for a few minutes. She pulled up a chair, stood on it, and lifted his trunk from the top of the wardrobe. The clips opened with dull metallic thuds and she raised the lid, staring at the torn yellowing lining inside, at the broken plastic coat hanger and the single black sock that lay in there, and remembered the first day she had ever packed this, fourteen years before. She could see the clothes lying neatly pressed and folded, the regulation string vests and Airtex shirts and the grey prep-school pullovers with the name tags neatly stitched in, and she felt herself crying and did not want to cry in case Otto came in and saw her.

  She opened the top drawer in his desk and saw his diary. She flipped through a couple of pages from March, but could see nothing of interest: dates and times of lectures; the start of the holiday marked with a thick line and the word SKIING written after. She turned back a few pages, to January 15th. ‘8pm. Dinner. Carrie.’ The previous day read: ‘7.30. Cinema. Carrie.’ There were no more entries mentioning Carrie after the fifteenth. A couple of days were blank, but with large asterisks marked on them. She turned forward to April 7th and smiled through her wet eyes at the black circle around the date, neat handwriting underneath. ‘MOTHER’S B’DAY.’

  She turned the pages forward and noticed a few other asterisks; they seemed to be about two weeks apart. She noticed an asterisk against May 4th and the date rang a bell. She felt suddenly as if an unseen hand had picked her up and dunked her in cold water; she felt the cold seep through her, as if she were litmus paper. May 4th; that was the date her watch had shown in the middle of her lunch with Philip Main.

  ‘How are you getting on?’

  She turned around. Otto was standing in the doorway, smiling that hideous knowing smile, the grotesque slashed and bruised mask that contained, she knew, so many secrets about her son. ‘O.K.,’ she said. ‘Fine. There’s some port in that decanter – you may as well have it.’

  ‘Port doesn’t last,’ said Otto, disdainfully. ‘That won’t be any good now.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said flatly. ‘There’s quite a lot of wine – you’re welcome to that.’ She wanted Otto to take something, desperately wanted him to take something, but she did not fully understand why, whether it was to have him in her debt, or simply to atone.

  He nodded uninterestedly. ‘I don’t think Fabian had that good taste in wine.’

  ‘His father was –’ she began, indignantly, then stopped, realizing she was rising to the bait. ‘What did you mean just now, Otto, that Fabian was always having problems with girls?’

  Otto walked over to the bookshelves and plucked a book out; he flipped through the pages. ‘I don’t think you knew very much about your son, Mrs Hightower,’ he said, absently.

  ‘Do your parents know much about you, Otto?’

  ‘My mother has been in a home since I was four. My father –’ he shrugged ‘– yes, I see him often.’

  ‘What sort of home?’

  ‘A home.’

  ‘A mental home?’ she said, gently.

  He looked away from her. ‘What are you going to do with everything?’

  ‘I don’t know. Take it back and –’ She realized she did not know. She closed the diary and looked at the rest of the papers. Puzzled, she noticed a wodge of postcards and a letter addressed to Fabian at Cambridge in a girl’s handwriting, all held together by a rubber band. She pushed them into the diary and put it into the bottom of the trunk. She could sense Otto watching her, but each time she turned around he was still leafing backwards and forwards through the pages. She folded a pair of trousers and laid them in the trunk, feeling embarrassed, as if she was looting.

  ‘I’ll take this book, if I may.’

  ‘Of course. Take anything you want – it’s no use – I mean – I’m just going to give this all away, so take anything.’

  Otto shrugged. ‘Just this.’

  ‘What is it?’

  He held up the cover. It was a slim paperback, F. R. Leavis on T. S. Eliot.

  She smiled. ‘I thought you were studying chemistry?’

  ‘I study lots of things.’

  He walked out of the room without saying anything further.

  As she drove back towards London, with the trunk wedged in the passenger seat, the drizzle turned to pelting rain. She watched the wipers clouting away the water, like angry hands, she thought.

  The rain turned to hail; the stones rattled on the car’s bodywork, drumming on the soft hood above her, and then turned back to rain again. She thought about Otto’s strange behaviour. He had always struck her as being weird, now he was even more so; anything was understandable, she supposed, after what he had been through; but there was a malevolence about him which seemed to have intensified, as if it was a joke that he had survived, some sort of bizarre personal joke. And his strange comments about Fabian; maybe it was true, maybe Carrie had ditched him, but his remark about Fabian always having problems with girls mystified her; what had he meant? Was he gay? Had he and Otto been lovers? She thought about Carrie again. A pretty little thing, with her spiky punk blonde hair and her chirpy South London accent and the awe in which she had walked round the house. ‘Like bloomin’ Bucknam Palace,’ she had said. Alex smiled. Hardly.

  ‘Actually, I like scrubbers, Mother,’ Fabian had said. God, he could be a ghastly snob at times, and then do something totally out of character, like bringing this girl home for Christmas and fawning all over her, as if it were a game. Carrie had been no fool, that was for sure. She tried to remember what she had been doing at Cambridge; reporting for some strange left wing magazine, something to do with ecology. She remembered driving down through Streatham with Fabi
an and his pointing out a dismal council high-rise complex, telling her proudly that was where Carrie’s mother lived.

  Suddenly there was a sharp scratching noise on the windscreen in front of her and she flinched; a car passed her in the fast lane, chucking up a heavy spray which blinded her for a moment; there was another sharp crunch and then another.

  Then the spray cleared, and she stared, transfixed with horror, at the single red rose entangled in the wiper arm, sweeping backwards and forwards across the windscreen.

  CHAPTER NINE

  She stopped on the hard shoulder, got out of the car and stood in the lashing wind and driving rain. A lorry thundered past, inches from her, the blast of its slipstream catching her, throwing her against the side of the Mercedes. She walked forward, put her hand out, and the wipers swept again, the rose scratching, shrieking against the howl of the wind and the whine of the traffic. She grabbed the wiper arm and lifted out the rose. It pricked her finger badly, and she swore; she released the arm and the wipers swept again, angrily. Another lorry passed, close, sucking her in its slipstream, then throwing spray like a breaking wave over her. She jumped back into the car, slammed the door against the elements, and switched on the interior light.

  The rose was red, blood red, like the stain trickling down from her finger which she put to her mouth and sucked. She stared out through her window at the rain, at the demoniac lights which hurtled past, at the roars and whines which faded away into the black.

  Then she looked down at the rose. Who had flung it from their car, or left it loose on the back of a lorry, or …? But no, that was impossible, a coincidence, that was all, she told herself half-heartedly. She sat, shaking, wanting to throw it back out there where it had come from, but she could not, instead she laid it down in front of the gear stick and drove off slowly, frightened.

  She carried the rose into the house and stood in the gloomy hallway, leaving the front door open behind her, not wanting to close it yet. She did not know why, but she did not want to cut off contact with the outside world.