Thirteen

The difference in their offers was not great, a matter of two hundred pounds. But the antique dealer with the thick, coppery eyebrows couldn’t collect the furniture for two weeks. And the auction house who offered the best price wanted the portrait of her great-aunt and uncle, to complete the set of four paintings that had been kept in the storage cage and were originals by a fine artist who had once been exhibited at the Royal Academy.

Neither dealer wanted the bed. Dismantling the ponderous, heavy frame and throwing it in the skip seemed inevitable. Lillian and Reginald’s marital bed was now firewood. Another belittlement from a world they had departed.

Still feeling too distressed from her upheaval the night before, Apryl was in no mood to haggle, and accepted the disappointing sum of five thousand pounds offered by the antiques dealer for everything. He didn’t break so much as a smile when the offer was accepted.

Having been convinced of the presence of a third figure in the painting the night before, April was strongly tempted to let the portrait go as well. But after having breakfast and a few cups of strong coffee, the sighting felt like a figment of her imagination. What had actually been seen? Something tall and thin and pale, standing bolt upright and grinning through a reddish murk. Like the flitting thing she had glimpsed behind her reflection in the mirror the night she wore Lillian’s clothes, the quick suggestion of a movement of brittle limbs across the floor towards her. She must have seen or read something that put these apparitions into her mind, because they weren’t anything she could just make up.

The place was getting to her. And Lillian’s journals were not helping, yet she couldn’t leave them alone. Once her business was concluded with the valuers, and she had booked a contract cleaner over the phone, she found herself at the kitchen table with the fourth journal open. But only after a brief inspection of a London A-Z with a plain black cover she had at first mistaken for another of Lillian’s diaries. It was in the same drawer as the journals, and the brightly coloured maps inside, featuring central London, were heavily marked with biro in various colours.

In the margins cramped notes detailed street names in Lillian’s handwriting, and inked lines snaked in every direction from Knightsbridge, representing her great-aunt’s attempts at exodus. Lines extending no more than a mile in any direction from the building.

That’s why nearly all of Lillian’s shoes were worn out. Her obsessive endeavours over such a long period of time were astonishing; the height of paranoid delusion. Apryl wondered again if Lillian’s love for her husband was so great that she wouldn’t allow herself to leave the last place they were together. When she mentioned her theory to Stephen when he called to ask if she would require the hire of another skip, he looked uncomfortable and apologized, as if expressing his condolences all over again. Her great-aunt’s eccentricity clearly embarrassed him.

At the kitchen table, armed with a pot of fresh coffee, she continued reading the fourth journal. The entries in this diary were shorter and more disjointed than the previous three, but all the more disturbing for the change in style:

I see them everywhere. Their thin silhouettes hanging in all of the windows. Not fully formed or half concealed by the shadows. Sometimes they just push uselessly against walls in the entries of basement flats, or crouch muttering in the quiet, dirty corners of mews streets or in the wasted spaces behind buildings. They populate the dead ends. It is in the places the sun never reaches where they exist. But their faces are the worst of all. I see them whenever I look up in Mayfair. Horribly white and thin, they peer down at the street from the oldest windows. Their mouths move but I cannot hear what they say. If they had lips I would try to read them.

In Shepherd Market, a place that even today refuses gentrification, they crowd and jostle in the empty rooms behind boarded-up doors. These ones I can sometimes hear, whispering through the cracks. They have spoken to me from where they hide. ‘Is he coming back?’ a woman kept asking me, and through a hole in the wooden boards I could see the bone of her ribs and spine.

‘I can’t seem to find them,’ another old thing whispered to me over and over again. I never knew whether it was a man or woman down there on its hands and knees behind some bins. Their milky eyes don’t seem to see me. It’s no use talking to them; they’re unaware of anything beside their own suffering, but seem to sense me momentarily.

Oh darling, I am half in this world and half in another. Like you were at the end. Now I understand and I ask your forgiveness for ever doubting you. I never looked too long at the things he had on his walls, as you and the others did. Never heard him speak as you did. And it was you who confronted him. Perhaps because my part was so slight the contagion has been slower to take effect. But maybe he was right after all, as you suspected at the end, and maybe what he told us was true.

But how did they get out from down there with him? How do they get into the things that once hung on our walls and into all of the mirrors? How can they appear before my eyes like this in daylight? Must I live alone in silence between bare walls until the end, and not risk any channel through which they can enter? Is hell so overcrowded they are coming back?

There were pages of it; lists of the strange and hideous visions her poor sick aunt encountered on the streets that must have once been a paradise of social appointments, luncheon engagements, dinner parties, shopping trips and clubs. And who was this individual she continually referred to? ‘And all the time he was calling them down. All of the voices and shadows and things that were not right in this building, on the stairs and in our rooms came to him when he called. ’

Apryl began to leave bookmarks of notepaper and to write anything down that seemed pertinent to the actual building. She suspected some event had occurred, involving both Lillian and Reginald, upon which her aunt blamed Reginald’s death, though there were never any specific details of his demise. If any resident of Barrington House from this period was still alive, she would like to know how her great-uncle had died. Lillian also wrote as if she had been condemned by some terrible act committed by her husband:

When you burned it all, you thought everything had been destroyed with it. But how could this survive fire? Yet they are here again despite what you did for us. For all of us.

The others won’t speak to me any more. They think I am to blame because I was your wife. I can see it in Beatrice’s eyes. She won’t open the door to me now. The manager has written me a warning, and so has her barrister, threatening me with legal action if I do not stop hounding her. Hounding her? I tell them there is strength in numbers. And that we are all in this together. But it does no good.

The Shafers will not see me either. Sometimes Tom calls and whispers into the phone when Myriam is in another room, but he always hangs up when she comes back. She controls him like she always did.

They’re all cowards. I tell myself I am better off without them. And they can’t throw me out because I can’t leave. The irony makes me laugh, but not with any joy. We’re to stay here while he plays with us and torments us for what we did, or we are to put an end to ourselves. But I cannot do that, my darling. Because I cannot know for sure whether it is a cruel trick or whether it is you I sometimes hear, behind the walls.

After closing the book in the late afternoon, in an effort to move her thoughts away from her great-aunt’s insane narratives Apryl went shopping in Harrods to buy some treats from the Food Hall, and then browsed in the clothes stores with sales on in Sloane Street and the King’s Road. But the street names and some of the landmarks only served to remind her of the routes Lillian had walked into her eighties, wearing a hat and a veil and broken-down shoes.

The rain drove her back to Barrington House when the stores closed at eight. It was cold and angled at the back of her neck. But at least the apartment had lost much of its clutter, and the hallway was now clear. And with another monumental effort on Friday, she figured she could rid the two end bedrooms of everything but the furniture and ornaments earmarked for sale.

But the increase in space in the apartment did not lead to an increase in light or comfort. With Stephen’s help, even after she had refreshed the lamps and overhead lights with new hundred-watt bulbs, a musty brownish haze still filled the air. And the extra illumination only served to attribute a sickly luminance to the paintwork of the ceiling, wainscoting and skirting boards, giving it the discoloured effect of weathered pottery in museum display cases.

She feared no one would want to buy it. Unless it was stripped, gutted and renovated from floor to ceiling, any future inhabitants would be forever trapped inside an old photograph. It was a demoralizing place, the smell of dust and dried damp and old furniture somehow a fitting reminder of her great-aunt’s lonely, despairing and whispering entrapment until death.

The irony didn’t escape Apryl: she was in one of the oldest and most exclusive apartment buildings in the swankiest part of London, one of the most expensive cities in the world, but was reduced to using an old bath, to inhabiting a dismal space between stained and peeling walls, surrounded by half a century of dross and the neglected detritus of a crazy dead relative’s life.

By nine o’clock she was in bed with another journal open in her lap, and a glass of white wine on the side table. And once again she was quickly immersed among the things that scurried about her hallucinating great-aunt:

It moved like a monkey around me.

. She said, ‘They should be here soon. Shush, I think I hear them now,’ and then put the little thing’s mouth to her shrivelled teat.

. On such thin legs it came after me, chattering.

. Wrapped in a stained white gown, with no hair on the yellowish head, it threw its long arms up in the air at the sight of me. I’m sure it saw me down in the street. The building was very old and in one window a blanket had been nailed to the sash frame.

. Someone brought me home. I don’t remember the journey. Then a doctor was called for. But not my doctor; a man whose hands I didn’t like came instead.

In all this she found a man’s name repeated twice:

. I’ve looked for his name in other places. The book shop on Curzon Street, where Nancy used to live, ordered what they could for me on his period. But he was unknown. As you once said, ‘no self-respecting or decent gallery would hang his abominations on their walls.’ You always said he was insane. And he must have been to have been enthralled by such things. But Hessen has no publications or listings in journals or catalogues. The means that brought him here must have been private. I’ve asked around the last of our friends who know anything of painting and only two of them had heard of him. But they could tell me no more than what we already knew and nothing in relation to his art. Only that he went to prison with Mosley during the war for being a traitor.

I cannot reach the British Library, or even a local branch now. So maybe Hessen was a false name. Doesn’t the Devil assume different guises? And was all of this created solely to horrify us? Maybe he never had another purpose. There is no intelligence I can pursue to equip me to defeat him, or to at least evade his influence and escape. I have tried everything. The clergyman who comes here to see the dying Mrs Fore-gate in number seven thinks I am mad whenever I accost him.

Yet we are all still here and falling apart. If I was taken by force from here I would go hysterical. I would die in a fit. So why do I cling on to this pitiful existence, darling? Because it is the thought of where I will go that is more powerful than the bliss of release, that prevents me following you. How can I be sure that part of me, with even less free will, won’t remain here for ever? To be powerless like those things outside. Hunting through the dark for people and places and things they have already forgotten.

Apryl wrote the name Hessen in her diary alongside the names of the residents mentioned by Lillian. She wanted a psychiatrist back home to read some of these journals too. To explain to her what was wrong with her great-aunt’s mind and to reassure her it wasn’t hereditary. And she would have been inclined to dismiss this evidence of a painter tormenting Lillian as illusory if it weren’t for the repeated references in the text to Reginald’s role in some dispute.

You were the first to be firm. To take action. I am still in awe of you my darling as I was when we were together and so much closer than we are now. Because I tell myself every day that you can hear me. It’s the only thing that keeps me going.

You were a hero in the war and you tried to become the hero for all of us here. You refused to move away as the others did. To flee the shadows that came up so many stairs and slid along the walls and entered our private rooms, and our sleep. You wouldn’t be turned out of our home by a horrible little Hun like Hessen. And neither would the Jews who had lost all of their family in the war. But I’d never heard you talk like that before. It frightened me. Now I understand you were afraid too. To hear you say ‘we should have finished this business the night he had the accident.’ To think back now on how we helped him and let him survive, only to have him come back with a greater darkness. It fills me with despair.

You tried to do the best for all of us. But what was silenced began to speak again, and show itself. It still does, darling. It still does. I only hope you can no longer see it. The thought of you being among them would finish me.

I wish with all my heart that we had left when we had the chance. Why must fate be so cruel? You came back to me after so many missions when so many were lost, only for me to see you taken away again. Right from my hands. And before my eyes.

With the lights on as usual, and the mirror and painting now not merely turned around, but placed in the hallway outside her bedroom door, Apryl sank down among four fat pillows, half upright as if she neither wanted nor expected to sleep.

High up on the ninth floor the windows were occasionally whumped by the wind. Outside the apartment the faint whirr and clank of the elevator could be heard. Sometimes a front door closed and sent its noise up the dim stairwells and through her great-aunt’s flat. The knowledge that there were others in the building gave her comfort.

She pushed her drowsing thoughts into tomorrow’s activities – the wrapping of the photographs in cushioned plastic sheets, the bundling of the dead roses into bin bags, maybe a phone call to thank the taxi driver who brought Lillian home that last time. Maybe. Estate agents. Maybe.

Was she asleep? It was as if she was sleeping but somehow still aware of the room around her. Like she was just under but not completely. Not something that happened to her often, but the feeling was familiar, as she lay alone, the sole inhabitant of the apartment, but aware of what was around her in the bedroom.

So who was that, leaning over the bed?

Other people in the building must have heard her scream. For a while, after she sat bolt upright among the pillows, before scrabbling out of the bed, a foot caught in the sheets and then kicked away like it was a hand pulling her down to somewhere that terrified her, she heard voices. In the distance. Beyond her own heavy breaths and whimpers, she heard voices. Like the sudden burst of sound from a distant school playground carried on the wind.

The wind: it was outside the windows and walls, but elsewhere too. Up on the ceiling. The ceiling that had become dark and endless around something that had looked like a face, drawing away. Something red was tight about it. A face retreating into the darkness where the main light should have revealed cracks and yellowing paint and not that depth of no colour and such bitter coldness. A coldness that went through the skin and into the bones.

But where was the face now, and the voices, and the wind?

As Apryl stood by the bedroom door and looked back at the bed from which she had fled, her whole body shaking, dressed in just her underwear, her great-aunt’s room now looked the same as it had done before she fell asleep. The lights were on, the walls were bare, and there was no one else in there with her.