Apartment 16

Nine

The mirror was turned so it faced the wall. All night long it had reflected nothing but the noble image of her great-aunt and uncle in dusty oil paint, instead of her lying frightened and tense in bed.

She had turned the mirror round because it frightened her. But it was just a long mirror in a dark room, in an old apartment, in a strange city, in which a tired and excitable girl had become overwhelmed by all the things she had seen, thought and imagined. Just an overwrought mind imagining a presence in a mirror. Nothing more.

Dim morning light hovered around the window frames, emitting a thin greyish haze through the net curtains. She hadn’t closed the drapes the night before in order not to feel trapped, as if the windows above Lowndes Square offered the possibility of a quick escape. All the lamps were still on too, along with the ceiling lights.

Confounded by how her mind had invented terrors to torment her, she clambered out of bed and looked out at the sky, already dark, and rippled with stripes of tangerine. It was as if night was ready to reclaim the earth again at nine in the morning.

Tired and tense, as if she hadn’t slept at all, she pulled the net curtains back to allow more light inside. As she rearranged the gauzy fuss, something hit the floor at her feet and bounced. A blue and white saucer lay upside down on the carpet and near it was an iron key with butterfly-wing handles. About the right size for the drawers of the bureau. She moved quickly to the heavy and dark piece of furniture opposite the foot of the bed.

The key turned in the first lock with a tiny thump that she felt in her fingers rather than heard.

There were so many tickets in there. For train and plane travel — even tickets for journeys by sea. They were arranged into stacks by year and then secured with red rubber bands in the uppermost drawer. But not a single ticket had been clipped, stamped or torn along the perforated strip. These were tickets for journeys planned but never taken. And most of them listed the United States as the destination. From as far back as 1949, Lillian had been planning to go home.

Apryl thought about what Stephen had said about Lillian’s final farewells as she left the building for her morning wanderings. There had been a little case with her too, with an expired passport and a plane ticket inside, clearly packed for an overseas journey, on the day she died. But why had Lillian broken contact with her sister and family, when the United States was such an important a place for her to reach? It didn’t add up.

She’d heard of ritual obsessives and their precise but irrational routines, and this was further evidence of her great-aunt’s deteriorating mind. A demise beginning four decades earlier. Wearing an antique hat and veil and launching out of the building with America in mind as her destination, only to return confused and disoriented an hour later, before she reset herself and began the process all over again the following day. If it hadn’t been her own aunt and benefactor she might have smiled at the idea; but instead she wondered how in this day and age so wealthy a woman had been allowed to go on like that for so long.

In the drawer below there were copies of birth certificates for Lillian and Reginald, some old unfranked stamps, Reginald’s service medals, his wedding ring, and hair clippings in a plastic sachet. Beneath all this lay a densely stacked assortment of private papers that looked like investment statements, insurance documents and household bills, neatly ordered inside linen envelopes. Her aunt had been meticulous as well as batshit crazy. Apryl figured she’d have to make sense of it all later.

The opening of the bottom drawer, unless there was a safe or bank vault somewhere, represented the last undiscovered remains of Great-aunt Lillian’s estate. The scent issuing from it pierced her sinuses with the strong but not unpleasant fragrance of pencil shavings, dust, and dry ink. It clouded over her face and then quickly sank back into the dark wooden space that she could see was full of books. All with plain covers and from a time when book binding and production was seen as a craft. Each volume had a woven fabric or leather cover. Dusty and neglected but of some quality — which just about summed up the end of her great-aunt’s life.

Opening the red book on the top of the stack revealed lined pages filled with handwriting, but with no dates given. She flicked through the stiff pages and soon realized that a separate sheet had been used for each entry, written by an unsteady hand.

The writing was difficult to decipher. Was that a b? And what at first looked like an s was actually an f. It also slanted so far to the right that the longer strokes were in danger of lying flat and crushing the vowels against the blue lines on the paper. She flicked through to the last entry. It said something about ‘trying again in the morning’. And ‘taking the Bayswater Road, which I’ve not seen in years’.

Going back to the first page, she pressed her finger under each word and moved her lips like a child learning to read, slowly moving through parts of the scrawl, and abandoning whole sentences and paragraphs when the jumble of letters and scratchings defeated her. But on occasion an individual word would stand out, or even a clause, such as: ‘further than before here. Years ago.’ And: ‘There are cracks to get through where he won’t follow. Or be waiting.’ At least that’s what seemed to have been written, but she couldn’t be sure and the tiny muscles behind her eyes were beginning to strain. The light in the bedroom was too dim for the task.

She put the first journal aside and raised five more out of the drawer. The writing in these was similar to the first, but at least one volume had months written above the entries, though there were often question marks following them — ‘June?’ — as if Lillian were unaware of the date as she wrote.

There were twenty of these journals in total and Apryl placed them all on the top of the bureau in the exact order in which they had been removed from the drawer, assuming that Lillian’s arrangement followed a chronological pattern, with the oldest diaries at the bottom.

She was right. The writing was much clearer in the last journal to leave the drawer. It was nearly all legible and very attractive to look at. And there were no errors, as if what had been written had been carefully composed.

Delaying the phone calls she had to make, Apryl went back over to the bed and sank into the musty goose-feather pillows. And from the first journal she began to read pages at random:

Highgate and the Heath are entirely lost to me now. I have accepted this. I went there to remember so many of the walks we took together. But they will have to live on in memory alone. And I haven’t seen St Paul’s in at least six months. I cannot get near the city. It is too difficult. After my episode on the underground, I have sworn off travelling below ground. The breathlessness and anxiety may be acute outdoors in the street, but they are doubly so below ground in those tight tunnels. Even my afternoons at the Library and British Museum in Bloomsbury are in jeopardy.

Not those too? I keep asking myself in despair. When will this tormenting end and what will I finally be left with? The tightness in my chest and the flickering of my vision has occurred twice in the reading room like the slow onset of some appalling migraine. I had water brought to me. The second time a man with terrible breath tried to take advantage of me.

Doctor Hardy still insists I am healthy. But how can I be? Doctor Shelley claims I am an agoraphobic and will insist on meddling with my childhood memories. Soon I will have exhausted the wisdom of Harley Street. I dare not tell them about the mirrors. The rest shall have to go downstairs too.

Most of the other entries in the journal were along similar lines. Catalogues of fatigue and curious bodily sensations in different locations around London that Apryl couldn’t picture or even place on a map. But it seemed that her aunt had suffered acute anxiety attacks whenever she strayed too far from Barrington House.

Increasingly, the entries became lists of directions she assumed her aunt had tried to follow in order to leave, or even escape, London. Train stations abounded: Euston, King’s Cross, Liverpool Street, Paddington, Charing Cross, Victoria. Lillian had tried to reach them all but succumbed to an attack of nerves combined with unpleasant and paralysing physical symptoms at each attempt. Something she began to refer to as the sickness.

Or maybe she was attempting to test some kind of boundary she felt had been imposed upon her freedom. Sometimes it seemed these obsessive journeys were taken as a form of reconnaissance.

Some entries involved other people who were never described in any real detail, because her dead husband, to whom these journals were addressed, was already familiar with them:

East, I can reach no further than Holborn. To the West his boundary encroaches deeper. Today I was forced to call Marjory from the street to cancel luncheon. I can go no further in that direction than the Duke of York’s Headquarters. Bridge is an impossibility because Holland Park may as well be in China considering how far I can reach out these days.

With every cancellation the girls wonder about me. I can hear it in their voices and they are nervous with me, though they are good enough to try and conceal it if they ever come to dinner in Mayfair. If I cancel many more appointments or refuse invitations I fear I shall have no friends left at all. And I’m satisfied that crossing the river is not an option. I have been thwarted on the Westminster Bridge twice after setting off with my head held high, only to be overcome by the profound dizziness and weariness that made me faint before I was helped to a bench like an unfortunate blind woman.

It is so hard to countenance now as I sit here writing to you, as clear-minded and upright as I have taken for my right in life. But along the Embankment to Grosvenor Road I can do little but crawl like a cat miserable with some internal injury and gaze across at Wandsworth as if it were paradise. A place I never wished to visit when you were alive, darling. But would gladly go barefoot and penniless amongst the cranes and concrete if it meant I could be free of him, and this sickness he has brought me. And the others have it too. They cannot fool me. Beatrice has not been further than Claridges for a year now. And when I told her I had been sick on my shoes in Pimlico she stopped returning my calls as if I were the contagion. She is a cowardly thing, and a terrible bully. We can’t keep the staff. She takes this imprisonment out on those who are not to blame. She will not allow the idea that he is behind this appalling situation to even enter her mind. And the Shafers are sweet enough to me, but have begun to complain of bad hips as if they are already old and infirm. Their silly heads are firmly buried in the sand, my darling. As long as a few old friends still visit them they tell themselves they do not need to leave the building. And they still will not tell me what happened the day they tried to flee London from King’s Cross.