Эндрю Тэйлор – Fallen Angel (страница 9)

They moved slowly up the last flight of stairs. They were on the top floor of the house. Someone was playing rock music in a room below them. The house smelled of cooking and cigarettes. Mrs Gunter stopped outside one of the three doors on the top landing and fiddled with her keyring.

‘I phoned that woman at Social Services this morning. I’m sorry, I said, I can’t have her back here. It’s not on, is it? They pay me to give her a room and her breakfast. I’m not a miracle-worker.’ Mrs Gunter darted a hostile glance at Sally. ‘I leave the miracles to you.’

She unlocked the door and pushed it open. The room was small and narrow with a sloping ceiling. The first thing Sally noticed was the makeshift altar. The top of the chest of drawers was covered with a white cloth on which stood a wooden crucifix flanked by two brass candlesticks. The crucifix stood on a stepped base and was about eight inches high. The figure of Christ was made of bone or ivory.

‘If you met her on the stairs she was always muttering to herself,’ Mrs Gunter said. ‘For all I know she was praying.’

The sash window was six inches open at the top and overlooked the back of the house. The air was fresh, damp and very cold. The single bed was unmade. Sally stared at the surprisingly small indentation where Audrey Oliphant had lain. There were no pictures on the walls. A portable television stood on the floor beside the wardrobe; it had been unplugged, and the screen was turned to the wall. In front of the window was a table and chair. Against the wall on the other side of the wardrobe was a spotlessly clean washbasin.

‘She left a note.’ Mrs Gunter twisted her lips into an expression of disgust. ‘Said she was sorry to be such a trouble, and she hoped God would forgive her.’

‘How did you find her?’

‘She didn’t come down to breakfast. I knew she hadn’t gone out. Besides, it was time for her to change her sheets. And I wanted to talk to her about the state she leaves the bathroom.’

They found a leather-and-canvas bag with a broken lock in the wardrobe. As they packed it, Mrs Gunter kept up a steady flow of complaint. Meanwhile her hands deftly folded faded nightdresses and smoothed away the wrinkles from a tweed skirt.

‘She’s run out of toothpaste, the silly woman. I’ve got a bit left in a tube downstairs. She can have that. I was going to throw it away.’

‘Do you know where she went to church?’

‘I don’t know if she did. Or nowhere regular. If you ask me, this was her church.’

Sally picked up the three books on the bedside table. There was no other reading material in the room. All of them were small and well-used. Sally glanced at them as she dropped them in the bag. First there was a holy bible, in the Authorized Version. Next came a book of common prayer, inscribed ‘To Audrey, on the occasion of her First Communion, 20th March 1937, with love from Mother’.

The third book was Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici, a pocket edition with a faded blue cloth cover. Sally opened the book at the page where there was a marker. She found a faint pencil line in the margin against one sentence. ‘The heart of man is the place the Devils dwell in: I feel sometimes a Hell within my self; Lucifer keeps his Court in my breast, Legion is revived in me.’

As Sally read the words her mood altered. The transition was abrupt and jerky, like the effect of a mismanaged gear change on a car’s engine. Previously she had felt solitary and depressed. Now she was on the edge of despair. What was the use of this poor woman living her sad life? What was the use of Sally’s attempt to help?

The despair was a familiar enemy, though today it was more powerful than usual. Its habit of descending on her was one of those inconvenient facts which she had to live with, like the bad dreams and the absurd moments when time seemed to stop; just another outbreak of freak weather in the mind. While she was driving to the hospital she tried to pray but she could not shift the mood. Her mind was in darkness. She felt the first nibbles of panic. This time the state might be permanent.

On one level Sally continued to function normally. She parked the car and went into the hospital. In the reception area she exchanged a few words with a physiotherapist who sometimes came to St George’s. She took the lift up to the seventh floor. A staff nurse was slumped over a desk in the ward office with a pile of files before her. Sally tapped on the glass partition. The nurse looked at the dog collar and rubbed her eyes. Sally asked for Audrey Oliphant.

‘You’re too late. Died about forty minutes ago.’

‘What happened?’

The nurse shrugged – not callous so much as weary. ‘The odds are that her heart just gave way under the strain. Do you want to see her?’

They had given Audrey Oliphant a room to herself at the end of the corridor. The sheet had been pulled up to the top of the bed. The staff nurse folded it back.

‘Did you know her?’

Sally stared at the dead face: skin and bone, stripped of personality; no longer capable of expressing anger or unhappiness. ‘I saw her once in church. I didn’t know her name.’

On the bed lay the woman who had cursed her.

Sally found it difficult not to feel that she was in one respect responsible for Audrey Oliphant’s death. It made it worse that the old woman now had a name. Perhaps if Sally had tried to trace her, Audrey Oliphant might still be alive. The pressure must have been enormous for a woman of that age and background to kill herself.

She phoned Mrs Gunter from the hospital concourse and gave her the news.

‘Best thing for all concerned, really.’

Sally said nothing.

‘No point in pretending otherwise, is there?’ Mrs Gunter sniffed. ‘And now I suppose I’ll have to sort out her things. You’d think she’d be more considerate, wouldn’t you, being a churchgoer.’

Sally said she would return Audrey Oliphant’s bag.

‘Hardly seems worth bothering. Audrey said she hadn’t got no relations. Not that they’d want her stuff. Nothing worth having, is there? Simplest just to put it out with the rubbish. Except Social Services would go crazy. Crazy? We’re all crazy.’

During the afternoon the despair retreated a little. It was biding its time. Sally visited the nursing home. She let herself into St George’s and tried to pray for Audrey Oliphant. The church felt cold and alien. The thoughts and words would not come. She found herself reciting the Lord’s Prayer in the outmoded version which she had not used since she was a child. The dead woman had probably prayed in this way: ‘Our Father, which art in heaven.’ The words lay in her mind, heavy and indigestible as badly cooked suet.

Halfway through, she glanced at her watch and realized that if she wasn’t careful she would be late picking up Lucy. She gabbled the rest and left the church. The Vicarage was empty but she left a note for Derek, who was still enjoying himself with the archdeacon.

It was raining, sending slivers of gold through the halos of the streetlamps. As Sally drove, she wondered whether Lucy had forgotten the conjuring set. It was unlikely. For one so young she could be inconveniently tenacious.

Sally left the car double-parked outside Carla’s house and ran through the rain to the front door. The door opened before she reached it.

Carla was on the threshold, her hands outstretched, her face crumpled, her eyes squeezed into slits and the tears slithering down her dark cheeks. The big living room behind her was in turmoil: it seethed with adults and children; and the television shimmered in the fireplace. A uniformed policewoman put her hand on Carla’s arm. She said something but Sally didn’t listen.

Michael was there too, talking angrily into the phone, slashing his free hand against his leg to emphasize what he was saying. He stared in Sally’s direction but seemed not to register her presence: he was looking past her at something unimaginable.

2

‘I am naturally bashful; nor hath conversation, age, or travel, been able to effront or enharden me …’

Religio Medici, I, 40

Eddie called her Angel and so had the children. He knew the name pleased her but not why. Lucy Appleyard refused to call Angel anything at all. In that, as in so much else, Lucy was different.

Lucy Philippa Appleyard was unlike the others even in the way Angel chose her. It was only afterwards, of course, that Eddie began to suspect that Angel had a particular reason for wanting Lucy. Yet again he had been manipulated. The questions were: how much, how far back did it go – and why?

At the time everything seemed to happen by chance. Eddie often bought the Evening Standard, though he did not always read it. (Angel rarely read newspapers, partly because she had little interest in news for its own sake, and partly because they made her hands dirty.) Frank Howell’s feature on St George’s, Kensal Vale, appeared on a Friday. Angel chanced – if that was the appropriate word – to see it the following Tuesday. They had eaten their supper and Eddie was clearing up. Angel wanted to clean her shoes, a job which like anything to do with her appearance was too important to be delegated to Eddie.