Sleep, Pale Sister

63

I was between the rapacious thighs of my latest inamorata the day they arrested me.

Oh, it was all very genteel. The two constables waited politely while I got up, robed myself modestly in a Chinese silk dressing-gown and listened as the older of the two constables informed me, in a slightly apologetic tone, that I was under arrest for the murder of Euphemia Chester, and that the London Police Department would be grateful if I would accompany him to the station as soon as it was convenient.

I’ll admit that the comedy of the situation struck me forcibly. So Henry had revealed all, had he? Poor Henry! If there had not been the question of the money I might have laughed aloud; as it was, I think I carried off the situation in the grand manner. I smiled, turned to the girl (howling and attempting to veil her not inconsiderable charms with a sheet) and blew her a kiss, made a small bow to the constables, picked up my clothes and marched, Orientally silken, out of the room. I was enjoying myself.

I waited for a dreary hour in a Bow Street cell while officers discussed my imaginary crime outside the door-I passed the time cheating at patience (I had found a pack of cards in my coat pocket)-and when two officers, one cranelike and phlegmatic, the other short and choleric, finally came into my cell the floor was a mosaic of coloured squares. I smiled ingenuously at them.

‘Ah, gentlemen,’ I said cheerfully, ‘how nice to have company at last. Won’t you sit down? I’m afraid it’s rather bare, but, as you see…’ I gestured towards a bench in the corner.

‘Sergeant Merle, sir,’ said the tall officer, ‘and this here is Constable Hawkins…’

I’ll say this for the English police; they’re always respectful of class. Whatever a gentleman may have done he is still a gentleman, and gentry have certain rights. The right to eccentricity, for example: Sergeant Merle and his constable listened patiently as I explained the truth about my relationship with Effie, the business with Fanny and Marta, and finally our attempt to fake Effie’s death in the churchyard. The policemen remained stolid and unquestioning (Merle occasionally scribbling details into his little notebook) until I had finished my narrative, frozen into attitudes of respectful disinterest. Oh yes, I love the English police.

When I had finished, Sergeant Merle turned towards his subordinate and said something to him in a low voice; then he looked at me again.

‘So,’ he said with a frown of concentration, ‘you’re saying, sir, that although Mr Chester thought that Mrs Chester was dead-’

‘She was in fact alive. I see you have grasped the salient points of the narrative with stunning alacrity.’ The sergeant narrowed his eyes and I smiled sweetly at him.

‘And…have you any proof of this, sir?’

‘I saw her that night, sergeant; and on several later occasions at Crook Street. I know for a fact that Chester met her the night he suffered the attack. She was very much alive then.’

‘I see, sir.’

‘I strongly suggest, sergeant, that you send a man to Crook Street to question Fanny Miller and her ladies. You will find that Miss Miller will corroborate my story. Mrs Chester may even be there.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘Failing that, you would doubtless find it useful to open the Isherwood vault in Highgate cemetery, where Mrs Chester was supposedly buried.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And after you have done those things, Sergeant Merle, I should be grateful if you would bear in mind the fact that, in spite of my natural delight in helping the police with their inquiries, I do have my own life to live, and would like to be allowed to continue living it as soon as possible.’ I smiled.

Merle’s frigid courtesy did not waver. ‘Just a formality, sir,’ he said.

Hours passed. From the window of my cell I saw the sky darken, and a warden came at about seven with a tray of food and a mug of coffee; at eight the warden returned, taking the tray with him. At ten I hammered on the door of my cell, demanding to know why I had not yet been released. The warden was courteous and impenetrable; he gave me a pillow and some blankets and advised me to sleep. After a while, I did.

I suppose I dreamed; I remember waking with cigar-smoke and the smell of brandy in my nostrils, my mind a blank, my perspective gone. It was almost dark except for the reddish light from the little lamp beside me on the bed; the walls were curtained in shadow, the window a blind eye on to the night.

There was a round table in the middle of the floor in front of me and, as my eyes adjusted to the dimness, I recognized it as one which I had had in my study at Oxford years ago. How odd to see it there, I thought vaguely to myself as I reached out a hand to touch the polished surface and the worn inlay around the side…How odd. And someone had been playing cards, I saw; all around the edge of the table, in a concentric pattern, there were cards, very white in the gloom, almost seeming to glow with a soft reflective quality, like snow…

I found myself standing, moving without thinking towards the table. A chair which had previously been tucked beneath it glided out and I sat down, my eyes fixed on the cards. No ordinary cards, these, I thought: each one had, painted in the centre, an ornate letter of the alphabet, intricately knotted into the card’s design in a baroque forest of leaves and scrollwork.

I frowned vaguely, wondering what kind of game I had joined. As I peered at the circle of cards, trying to discover whether this might be some complicated kind of patience, my eye caught a gleam of crystal reflected against the table’s surface. A discarded glass, still half full of brandy, glinted in the red light. As I looked up, I must have knocked the table, because the glass tilted and fell, spilling the drink in a wide, gleaming arc. A couple of cards were caught in its path and carried to the edge of the table in front of me. Drops of the dark liquid trickled on to my hand as I saw that the cards were the Knave of Hearts and the Queen of Spades: ‘Le beau valet de coeur et la dame de pique…’; the letters M and E.

It was at that moment, of course, that I knew I was dreaming. The absurd symbolism, the wholly unsubtle reference to Baudelaire and the baroque imagery of death…the artist in me knew it at once, in spite of the oddly tactile nature of the dream: the smooth coldness of the polished wood beneath my fingertips; the wet patch on my trouser-leg where the brandy had spilled; the sudden chill in the air. It was so cold that my nostrils stung with it and my breath was a nimbus around my face. I looked at the table once more and saw that the spilled brandy had frozen, a spiderweb glaze across the dark oak, and the empty glass was misted with frost. I began to shiver in spite of my knowledge that this was only a dream-it was probably cold in my prison cell, I thought reasonably, and my sleeping mind had created this tableau (macabre enough to fill Henry Chester with enthusiasm) to entertain itself. Its title: Le Remors or The Phantom’s Patience; all it needed to make it a Gothic masterpiece was the Pre-Raphaelite lady, pale from her long sleep but deathly beautiful, the baneful damozel with blood on her lips and vengeance in her eyes…

The thought was so absurd that I laughed aloud. Haunted by my own fiction, by God! Fanny would appreciate that. And yet I remembered Effie’s face, her pale lips, the bleak hatred in her voice as she said: ‘There is no Effie.’

Only Marta.

Damn that bitch.

‘There is no Marta!’ I said it aloud-in dreams I can do as I please-and felt a small release in tension. I said it again. ‘There is no Marta.’

Silence absorbed my words.

Uneasy silence.

Then suddenly she was there, sitting in front of me at the table with a glass of milky absinthe in her hand. Her hair was loose, falling over the chair-back to the floor in a cascade of heavy ringlets which gleamed rich as claret in the crimson light. She was wearing the dress she had worn for The Card Players, a dark red velvet cut low over the bodice so that her skin seemed luminous. Her eyes were immense and fathomless; her smile, so different to Effie’s sweet and open smile, was like a slit throat.

‘Effie…’ I kept my voice light and level; there was no reason for my throat to tighten, my lips to parch; no reason for the trickle of heat to sting my armpits. No reason…

‘No, not Effie.’ It wasn’t Effie’s voice; it was that hoarse, scratched-silver whisper which was peculiarly Marta’s.

‘Marta?’ In spite of myself, I was fascinated.

‘Yes, Marta.’ She lifted her glass and drank; I watched as the clear crystal misted over and froze where she had touched it. A nice detail, I thought. I would have to use it in a painting one day.

‘But there is no Marta,’ I said again. In my dream it suddenly seemed very important to prove to her that I was telling the truth. ‘I saw you invent Marta. You made her out of paint and dye and perfume. She’s just another part you had to play, like the Little Beggar Girl or Sleeping Beauty. She doesn’t exist!’

‘She does now.’ That was Effie; that childish assertion. For a moment I even glimpsed her-or the ghost of her-then the dark eyes clouded over once again and she was all Marta. ‘And she’s very angry with you, Mose.’ She paused to drink again and I sensed her cold hate, her fury, like a draught of winter. ‘Very angry,’ she repeated softly.

‘This is ridiculous!’ I said. ‘There is no Marta. There never has been a Marta.’

She ignored me. ‘Effie loved you, Mose. She trusted you. But she warned you, didn’t she? She said she’d never let you leave her.’

‘It wasn’t like that.’ In spite of my detachment I sounded defensive-and felt it. ‘I thought it would be for-’

‘You were tired of her. You found other women who asked less of you. You bought them with Henry’s money.’ She paused. ‘You really wanted her dead. It was neater that way.’

‘That’s ridiculous! I never promised-’

‘But you did, Mose. You did. You promised.’

I lost my temper. ‘All right, all right! I promised!’ My anger drove a spike of migraine into my forehead. ‘But I promised Effie.

I never said anything to Marta.’ My head had begun to spin like a child’s top and I was light-headed with fury and something like terror. I was shouting, unable to stop as the words spilled out of me. ‘I hate Marta! I hate the bitch. I hate the way she looks at me, the way she seems to see everything, know everything. Effie used to trust me, to need me; Marta doesn’t need anyone. She’s cold. Cold! I’d never have left you if it hadn’t been for her.’ It was almost true. I stopped, panting, the ragged headache pounding in my temples. I forced myself to breathe deeply: ridiculous, to lose control in a dream. ‘I never made any bargain with Marta,’ I said quietly.

She was silent for a moment. ‘You should have listened to Fanny,’ she said at last.

‘What has Fanny to say to anything?’ I snapped.

‘She warned you not to stand in our way. She liked you,’ she said simply. ‘Now it’s too late.’

Don’t laugh if I tell you that, for a moment, as I looked into her sorrowful eyes I felt a kind of fearful regret, a despair like Dante’s cold hell. For a moment I saw myself spiralling downwards in darkness for a dizzying eternity, like a snowflake blown down a bottomless well. Suddenly the beating of my heart seemed a terribly fragile thing; nothingness yawned below me and, in a flash of ridiculous association, I remembered that night in Oxford when a voice from the dead had spoken from the card-table: ‘I’m so cold.’

So cold…

In that instant it occurred to me that my certainty that I was dreaming was a little absurd; when had a dream been so clear, so intense, so real? When had I been able to smell the absinthe in her glass, to touch the table-top, still sticky with spilled brandy? To feel the hairs rise on my shivering arms? I sprang to my feet, grasping her hand across the table; it was cold, a blue-veined hand of marble.

‘Effie…’ Suddenly I knew that I had to say something to her, something of terrible urgency. ‘Marta. Where is Effie?’ Her face was impassive.

‘You killed her, Mose,’ she said softly. ‘You left her in the vault and she died, just as you told Henry. You know you did.’

It was the wrong question. I could feel my time spiralling away.

‘Then who are you?’ I cried in desperation.

She smiled at me, a tiny, cold smile like a hunter’s moon.

‘You know, Mose,’ she said.

‘I don’t damned well know!’

‘You will,’ she whispered, and when I awoke in the dark, clammy with sweat and aching all over, her smile remained with me like a tiny, tugging fish-hook in the nape of my neck; it remains with me even now as I fall into the inconceivable emptiness of a world without Moses Harper…I see it gleaming through silent space like a bright scythe. ‘Ni vue, ni connue…’ Between blindness, ignorance and the relentless momentum of annihilation a man could fall in love.

And when they told me that morning that a woman’s body had been found in the Isherwood vault in Highgate cemetery I was hardly at all surprised.

64

You’d like to know, wouldn’t you? I can smell that hunger on you like sweat, hot and sour. Oh, you’d like to know all right. But I won’t tell you where I am-you’d never find me if I did-and anyway, all places look the same to the travelling folk: the farms, the towns, the little houses…all the same. I’m with the gypsies, now. It’s an honest life for the most part, and it’s safer to be always on the move. No-one asks any questions. We all have our secrets here, and our magic.

It’s easy to disappear in London. People come and go, all wrapped in their own business; no-one noticed an old woman with her basket of cats as they made their way through the soft snow. I left all my things in Crook Street; I suppose the girls sold them when they finally understood I was never coming back: I hope they did; they were good girls and I was sorry to leave them. But life’s like that. Travel light and fast, that was my motto, even in the old days when Marta was a little chit-and we’re light and fast twenty years on, with the snow at our backs like the Angel at the gate.

The Romanies took us without a word-they know all about hunting and hunted-they even gave us a wagon and a horse. Some of them still remembered my mother and said I had the look of her. I make potions and philtres to cure the gout-or a man’s hard heart-and I’ve got more friends than you ever had with your church and your preaching. They gave me a new name, too, though I’ll not tell it you, a gypsy name, and I sometimes tell fortunes at country fairs with my Tarot cards and my crystal ball and the green scarf draped over the light. But I won’t tell my cards for just anyone. No, it’s the young girls I like, the tender ones with their eyes shining and their cheeks flushed with fairy-tale hope; and maybe one day I’ll find a special one, a lonely one like Effie who can learn to fly and follow the balloons…

We keep on hoping, Marta and I. Last time was so close, she tells me, so heartbreakingly close. And we are closer now than we ever were; the memory of Effie, the grief of Effie, binds us together, not with bitterness but with a gentle melancholy at what might have been. Effie, our little girl. Our pale sister. We loved her, you know, more than either of you ever did; loved her enough to want her with us for ever…and in a way she is with us, in our hearts; poor, brave Effie, who brought my lost Marta back home.

On winter evenings I sit in my caravan with the blue candle burning and Tizzy, Meg and Alecto curled at my feet by the stove and I sing to Marta as she sits purring on my knee:

‘Aux marches du palais…

Aux marches du palais…

’Y a une si belle fille, lonlà

’Y a une si belle fille…’

We’ll find her one day, Marta, I promise her as I smooth her soft, midnight fur. A sensitive one with bright, innocent eyes. A lonely one who needs a mother, a sister. We’ll find her one day. One day soon…

65

It was Effie all right. They took me to identify the body as it lay in the morgue and they were polite throughout, with the quiet courtesy of the hangman. I could feel the noose tightening around my neck at every breath I took…She was lying on a marble block, slightly tilted, and in a gutter at my feet a strong disinfectant flowed, making tiny trickling sounds in the huge silence of the morgue.

I nodded. ‘That’s Effie.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Sergeant Merle remained impassive, as if he were discussing some matter of little interest. ‘The doctor says that the body was in the grave for some time. Since Christmas Eve, or thereabouts. The cold appears to have slowed the…er…degenerative process.’

‘But, damn it, I saw her!’

Merle looked at me expressionlessly, as if too polite to comment.

‘I saw her…days after that!’

Silence.

‘Besides, if I had known she was really dead, why on earth would I have told you where she was?’

The sergeant looked apologetic. ‘Mr Chester had already informed the police,’ he said. ‘The…er…responsibility, he said, was preying on his mind.’

‘Henry’s a sick man!’ I snapped. ‘He’s incapable of distinguishing fact from fantasy.’

‘The gentleman is certainly in a very disturbed frame of mind, sir,’ said Merle. ‘In fact, Dr Russell, the nerve specialist, feels that his mental health is uncertain.’

Damn the man! I could see Henry’s game: Queen’s evidence, and the word of a well-known doctor might mean that he never had to stand trial for Effie’s murder. But I’d be damned if I let him pin it on me.

‘Have you seen Fanny Miller?’ I could hear the desperation in my voice but was not able to curb it. ‘She’ll tell you the truth. It was all her idea in the first place. Effie was staying with her.’

Again the expression of respectful reproach. ‘I did send a man to Crook Street,’ said Merle stolidly. ‘But unfortunately the premises were empty. I posted a watch on the premises, but so far Miss Miller has not returned there. Nor has anyone else, for that matter.’

The news was like a blow to the neck.

‘The neighbours!’ I gasped. ‘Ask them. Ask any-’

‘Nobody remembers seeing a young lady answering Mrs Chester’s description on the premises at any time.’

‘Well, of course they didn’t!’ I snapped. ‘I tell you she was in disguise!’

Merle simply looked at me in mournful scepticism and I could not stop my hand from creeping up towards my neck. The invisible noose drew tighter.

I suppose you know the rest of the sordid tale-everyone else does. Even here among the racaille I have achieved a certain fame; they call me ‘Gentleman Jack’ and speak to me with the respect due to a gentry-tyke facing the Drop. Sometimes my guard slips me a greasy pack of cards and I deign to join him in a quick game of brag.

I always win.

My trial was a good one as they go: actually, I rather enjoyed the drama. The defence was plucky but easily winded-I could have told him that his plea of insanity wouldn’t wash-but the prosecution was a mean-mouthed old Methodist, who dragged out all the details of my chequered career, including some episodes even I had forgotten, with a lover’s attention to detail. There were a lot of women there too, and when the judge put on his black hat his quivering old voice was almost drowned out by the sounds of wailing and sobbing. Women!

Well, I got my three Sundays’ grace-and I didn’t see the priest on any of them-but at last he came to see me. He said that he couldn’t bear to see an unrepentant sinner go to the gallows. That was easy to solve, I told him: don’t hang me! I don’t think he appreciated the humour. They hardly ever do. With a tear in his rheumy old eye he told me all about Hell: but I remember my final triumphant painting, Sodom and Gomorrah, and I think I know even more about Hell than that old lecher. Hell is where all the wicked women go-I told you I liked them hot-and maybe from down there I’ll be able to look up the angels’ robes or habits or whatever it is they wear and discover the answer to that old theological question.

I can tell you’re shocked, padre; but remember that if there were no sinners in Hell, there’d be no entertainment for the folk at the balcony-and I always said I should be on the stage. So put those beads away and have a drop of something warm-money buys anything in here, you know-and maybe a hand or two of brag, then, when you leave, you can tell them you did your bit. Give the girls a kiss from me and tell ’em I’ll see them at the dance. Well, I do have a certain reputation to keep up.

But sometimes as I lie awake in the small hours I can’t help but wonder how they did it, Fanny and her dark daughter. And sometimes, as the seconds fall away relentlessly into nothing, I can almost find it in me to believe…in dreams, in visions…in cold little nightwalkers with light, freezing fingers and hungry mouths and hungrier hearts. In vengeful dreamchildren…in a love greater than death and stronger than the grave.

And within that twilit border of sleep, a picture seems to emerge-I always was good at pictures when I was sober-a picture which, if I narrow my eyes, almost comes into focus: a picture of a mother who loved her dead daughter so much that she brought her back to inhabit the body of another girl, a sad and lonely girl in need of love; and the need and the love together were so strong, calling her across the dark spaces, that she came, longing for her chance to live again. Oh yes, I know all about that longing. And together, the unhappy pale girl and the lost, frozen dark one created one woman, with the body of one and the mind of both and experience beyond human imagining…

At night, when such things seem possible, I think it very likely that that woman still walks the moonlit cobbles, though the body lies discarded in the morgue: she walks, still longing, still hungry…so cold…and so strong that, if she pleased, she could walk through walls and doors and limitless space to confront her murderers with scenes of black, delicate nightmare and rapturous insanity. She might spin stories of murder or paint visions of the pit…but behind the fury there would always be longing and a cold, despairing hunger. The dead are not forgiving.

There is a pervasive logic in this line of reasoning-and a strange pagan poetry. I find myself remembering snatches of my Classical education, to which I paid scant attention when I was at school. Yes, I read Aeschylus too, and I know where Fanny took the names of her cats. And knowing that I can almost believe…in angels, in daemons, Erinyes…Eumenides.

Almost.

I do have my reputation to think of.