The Ghost Writer

I FIRST SAW THE PHOTOGRAPH ON A HOT JANUARY AFTERnoon in my mothers bedroom. She was asleep-so I thought-in the sunroom at the other end of the house. I crept in through the half-open door, enjoying the feeling of trespass, breathing the scents of perfume and powder and lipstick and other adult smells, mothballs for the silverfish and insect spray for the mosquitoes our screens never quite managed to keep out. The net curtains were drawn, the blind half lowered; there was nothing to see through the window except the blank brick wall of old Mrs Noonan's place next door.

I stole across to my mothers dressing-table and stood listening in the dim light. The house was silent apart from the muffled ticking and creaking which my father insisted was the iron roof expanding in the heat, not someone creeping about in the dark cavity above the ceiling. One by one I tried the drawers, three on each side. As always, only the bottom left-hand drawer was locked. There were wooden panels between each layer, so you couldn't see what was in the drawer below by pulling out the one above. Last time I had searched through the litter of tubes and jars and bottles crammed into the uppermost drawer on the right. Today I started on the next one down, rummaging through a shoebox crammed with packets of needles and carded buttons, reels of coloured cotton and hanks of wool, the loose ends hopelessly tangled.

To see if there was anything behind the shoebox, I tugged at the drawer. It stuck, then shot right out of the dressing-table and hit the floor with a thud. I tried to force the drawer back in, but it wouldn't go. Any second now, I expected to hear my mother's footsteps hurrying up the hall, but no sound followed. Even the ticking in the ceiling had died away.

There seemed no reason why it wouldn't fit. Except that something cold and hard was stuck to the underside, right at the back. A small brass key. I had prised it loose, peeled away the tape and opened the locked drawer before the enormity of what I was doing had begun to register.

The first thing I saw was a book, whose title would elude me for years afterward. The Carillon? The Chemillon? The Chalmion? A word I didn't know. The grey paper cover was crumbling at the edges and pitted with rust-coloured spots. It had no pictures and looked grown-up and boring.

I couldn't find anything else. Then I saw that the brown paper lining on the bottom of the drawer was actually a very large envelope. It had a typewritten address and stamps on it, and one end had been slit with a knife. Another disappointment: just a thick bundle of pages with typewriting on them, tied together with rusty black ribbon. As I drew out the bundle, a photograph slid into my lap.

I had never seen the woman in the photograph before, and yet I felt I knew her. She was young, and beautiful, and unlike most people I had seen in photographs she did not look straight at you, but gazed away to one side, her chin tilted slightly upwards, as if she did not realise anyone was looking at her. And she did not smile, at least not at first. As I went on staring at her I began to think I could see the faintest trace of a smile, just at the corner of her mouth. Her neck was amazingly long and slender, and though the picture was in black and white, I felt I could see the changing colours of her skin where the light fell across the back of her neck and touched her forehead. Her hair, masses and masses of it, was drawn back behind her head and wound up in a long plait, and her gown-as I felt sure a dress as wonderful as hers must be called-was made of a soft dark velvety material, with shoulders gathered like the wings of angels.

Boys, I had learned from somewhere, were supposed to think their mothers were beautiful, but I suspected mine was not. She looked older and thinner than most of the mothers at my school, and worried about everything, especially me. Lately she had been very worried indeed. There were dark pouches under her eyes; the lines across her forehead and around her mouth seemed to be cutting deeper into the skin, and her hair, which used to be dark brown, had grey streaks running through it. I worried that I had worn her out by not being good enough; I was always meaning to be better, yet here I was burgling her secret drawer. But I also knew that the anxious, haunted look could descend when I had done absolutely nothing wrong. Whereas the woman in the photograph was calm and beautiful and alive, more alive than anyone I had ever seen in a picture.

I was still kneeling in front of the drawer, lost in the photograph, when I heard a hissing sound from the doorway. My mother stood rigid, fists clenched, nostrils flared. Tufts of hair stuck out from her head; the whites of her eyes seemed to be spilling out of their sockets. For a long, petrified instant she didn't move. Then she sprang, hitting and hitting and hitting me, screaming in time to the blows that fell wherever she could reach until I broke away and fled wailing down the hall.

FROM OLD MRS NOONAN I LEARNED THAT IF YOU SHIVERED for no reason it meant that someone was walking over your grave. Mrs Noonan was thin and stooped and had twisted papery hands with strange bulges around the knuckles; she smelt of stale lavender and felt the cold even in summer, especially when she took her first sip of tea. My mother didn't like her saying it, so Mrs Noonan took to shivering silently when she was drinking tea in our kitchen, but I knew what she meant. When I wasn't being bad, I used to imagine that someone had found out my mothers grave, a man in dark clothes with a dead white face who dodged behind a tombstone whenever he saw you coming, so that you could never catch him doing it. That was why her anxious look came down for no reason at all. Some days you could tell that he was tramping back and forth, back and forth, over and over her grave.

We would sometimes drive past Mawson cemetery, but I'd never been inside because we had no relatives there to visit. My father's parents were buried in Sydney, and he had a married sister in New Zealand who wrote every Christmas, but they never came to see us. All my mother's relatives were buried in England, and that was where I imagined her grave must be.

Mawson is an overgrown country town sprawled along the edge of the Great Southern Ocean. It used to be called Leichhardt, after some luckless explorer who never returned from the dead heart, until, so my father explained, the council decided to change it to something more cheerful. Beyond the remnants of the old town centre there's nothing much to see except shopping malls and filling stations and mile after mile of sprawling identical suburbs. Beaches to the south, hills to the north; the dead heart beyond. That was where you ended up if you crossed the narrow strip of farmland beyond the hills and kept driving north through the endless sandy scrub and saltpan into the desert. In summer when the north wind blew, clouds of fine red dust covered the town. Even inside, you could feel the grittiness of it between your teeth.

My mothers stories of growing up in the English countryside were full of things we didn't have in Mawson, chaffinches and mayflies and foxgloves and hawthorn, coopers and farriers and old Mr Bartholomew who delivered fresh milk and eggs to their house with his horse and cart. When she wasn't away at boarding-school, she lived with her grandmother Viola, and a cook and a maid, in a house called Staplefield which had staircases and attics and more rooms than you could count, and she had a best friend called Rosalind who was allowed to come and stay for the summer holidays. My mother could describe their favourite walks so vividly you felt you were there, provided you didn't interrupt. There was one I especially liked to hear about, which led across fields full of friendly cows to something called a wicket gate, up through an oak forest, where if you moved very quietly you might easily see a hare or a badger, and out into a clearing, where they would find-somehow it came as a complete surprise every time-a pavilion, which my mother once drew for me. It was like a smaller version of the bandstand in our Memorial Park, but freshly painted, cream and blue and dark green, with cushions for the polished wooden seats. No one ever disturbed them, so they would stay for hours, talking or reading or looking out over the countryside below, so far they could almost see the ships anchored away to the south in Portsmouth harbour.

At Staplefield, my mother and Rosalind could go anywhere they liked in complete safety, whereas boys who wandered away from home in Mawson would be dragged into cars by strange men and taken away and murdered, if the street gangs didn't get them first. Our house was a red brick bungalow on the edge of the old town, but double brick, as my father never tired of saying, not like the shoddy brick veneer they're building nowadays.

Like every other house in our street, it sat squarely on a quarter-acre of dead flat ground. There was one step up to the front porch and into the hall, which was always gloomy once the door had closed. We had plaster walls, cream with an odd brownish tinge, and dark green patterned carpet that smelled faintly of dog, even though we'd never had one. To the right was my mothers bedroom, the largest of the three, then the sitting-room (never to be called 'the lounge'). To the left was my fathers bedroom, then mine, then the kitchen with its grey linoleum, green-painted plywood cupboards, Laminex table and chairs, and an old yellow fridge which opened with a pull handle. At night I could hear the wheeze and rattle when the motor started up. You went on through a doorway to the bathroom and laundry and a tiny alcove we called the study, on the left opposite the sunroom. The sunroom itself was a lean-to extension made of cement sheet and hardboard, the only room in the house where it was light all day.

As I grew older the paddocks at the end of the street became development opportunities and then subdivisions as the shoddy brick veneer suburbs rolled over us, but we stayed put. Instead of mayflies we had Portuguese millipedes, uncountable armies of them, coming up out of the leaf litter when the autumn rain set in, armoured, segmented, swarming towards the light. In winter, if my father forgot to spray the paths, the inside walls would turn black overnight. You had to get the broom, sweep them off the walls, gather up the writhing mess with a brush and pan and carry them out by the bucketload. They were quite harmless but my mother hated the damp, clammy feel of them. And if you squashed even one, the bitter pungent smell seemed to follow you around the house.

In summer the millipedes went underground and the ants came in, an endless black column that no amount of poison would keep out of the food cupboard for more than a few hours. Kitchen ants were not supposed to bite but if you stood too long barefoot near one of their trails you would feel the nip nip nip of tiny jaws. Outside in the yard we had fierce orange bull ants whose bite was like a red-hot needle; and, for a season, two nests of the dreaded inchmen. Half a dozen of those could put you in hospital; if you slipped and fell against the mound you were as good as dead. Likewise if you were foolish enough to leave an open can of soft drink unguarded: a wasp would climb in through the hole, sting your throat as you swallowed and you would choke to death. Funnel-web and redback spiders lurked in the woodpile behind the shed; you had to wear heavy rubber gloves to gather firewood until we changed over to bottled gas, and stamp very loudly as you approached in case a deadly brown snake like the one that killed Mrs Noonan's cat was sharing the woodpile with the spiders.

At Staplefield they did not need flywire and could leave their windows open on summer nights. We had fine mesh screens on all the doors and windows, to keep out the small black flies which rose in clouds around the back door when anyone approached, clogging your eyes and nostrils and crawling into your ears, and the huge lumbering blowflies that according to my mother vomited whatever they had last eaten over your food as soon as your back was turned. But no wire, however fine, would keep out the flying ants that swarmed on the first hot night in spring, worming through the mesh to form a dense cloud around the light bulb. In the morning, feebly twitching bodies lay in a drift of severed wings.

If it hadn't been for my mother's stories, perhaps Mawson-street gangs, millipedes and all-would have been simply home to me. But for as long as I could remember, I had wondered why we didn't go to live at Staplefield. Asking her for reasons, though, did not just break the flow of recollection, but sent it into reverse. It wasn't simply that Staplefield had been sold to other people long ago, or that we couldn't possibly afford a house like that today. England too had come down in the world. Where once the chaffinches had sung, mountains of garbage now accumulated on every street corner, breeding giant rats which ate babies and thrived on the strongest poisons. No more long, cloudless summers; now it rained for eleven months of the year, and you could not get coal or electricity for weeks at a time. By the time I was seven or eight, I had learned not to ask, but the questions remained. Nobody in our street had an upstairs room, let alone a cook, and it was hard to see why you would need a whole extra person just to grill chops, boil vegetables, and open tins of fruit. Nevertheless, I could not help seeing our lack of staircases and servants as one more consequence of the obscure misfortune which had landed us in Mawson.

ALL AFTERNOON I STAYED HIDDEN BEHIND A STACK OF TIMber in the garage, expecting another beating. But she did not call, and eventually hunger and thirst drove me inside to face a long interrogation. No, I told her several times-'Look me in the eye, now, Gerard'-I had not done anything except look at the picture of the woman. I wanted to ask who she was, but I didn't dare, then or afterwards.

'Prying into other people's private things is a terrible sin,' she said finally-'sin' was a word she seldom used-'like opening their letters or reading their diaries or listening at doors. Promise me you'll never, never, never do anything like that again.'

I promised, which did not prevent me from sneaking into her bedroom at the first opportunity, only to find the drawer locked again, and the key no longer in its hiding place.

BY THE END OF THE SUMMER HOLIDAYS MY MOTHER HAD apparently forgotten my trespass. But something had been lost between us, something I could not identify until I realised that since the day she caught me with the photograph, she had not once mentioned Staplefield or Viola. I tried again and again to draw her out, in vain; at the merest hint of an approach, she seemed to suffer an attack of deafness, assuming a look of blank incomprehension until I changed the subject or slunk away.

It seemed a double punishment. Talking of Staplefield had been the one thing more or less guaranteed to soften the lines of worry etched into her forehead. Now I had not only proved myself too wicked to re-enter that enchanted world; I had deprived her of the comfort of talking about it. I crept about the house, trying to be good, or at least appear good, but it made no difference. My father kept even more out of the way than usual.

Gradually, I came to realise that my mother did not love me any less; indeed as I moved on to high school and adolescence, she seemed to become ever more anxious on my behalf. Unlike some of my schoolfriends, I had never been allowed to roam freely, but nor did I really want to; the world beyond the local shops a few hundred yards away was a sinister place, fraught with unseen menace of which funnel-webs, street gangs, and plausible well-dressed men who preyed on wandering boys were merely the outward and visible signs. Even the man from the Department of Statistics who knocked at the door one evening was a potential kidnapper in her eyes. If my father hadn't been home, she'd have refused to answer a single question. She needed to know where I was, every minute of every day; if I got home even half an hour late from school, I would find her hovering beside the telephone table in the hall. I knew myself to be the centre of her existence, but on the subject of her past-not only Staplefield, but her entire life before she arrived in Mawson to marry my father-the habit of silence grew between us.

We had photographs of my father's parents, of his sister and her husband and children, but of my mother nothing before her wedding day, and very little after. The wedding photograph, taken on the steps of Mawson Registry Office in May 1963, is in black and white, just the two of them, no confetti. My mother is wearing a skirt and jacket and the sort of shoes that used to be called sensible. Thirty-four years (as I would learn from my own birth certificate)-thirty-four years of being Phyllis May Hatherley have just ended without trace, at the side of Graham John Freeman. My father's left arm is crooked for her to hold, which she does awkwardly. His clenched fist presses against his ribs. The top of her head is level with the handkerchief projecting from his breast pocket. His dark suit doesn't fit properly; the sleeves are too short, the shoulders droop. You could easily mistake him for the father of the bride, though he's only eleven years older. The lower half of his face has already taken on the shrunken, slightly simian look that makes you think someone isn't wearing their false teeth. And despite my mother's insistence that the sun was shining, they both look cold and undernourished, as if it's really a winter's day in England, a decade or more earlier, with rationing still in force.

I don't think my father ever knew any more about her life before they met than I did. He seemed to have been born without the faintest vestige of curiosity. His own father had come from an engineering family in Southampton, emigrated to Sydney in the 1920s, married, survived the Depression and war service as a mechanic in the RAAF, and set up his own machine shop. Dedicated to perpetuating the finest standards of British craftsmanship, with a portrait of the reigning monarch on the office wall. So far as my father was concerned, his entire family history could be expressed in micrometer readings, expansion coefficients, and the ability to work to tolerances set not merely in 'thou', but within a few ten-thousandths of an inch. As a draftsman, he must have been fluent in the new metric system, but we spoke only imperial at home. Whatever they might believe at Mawson Junior High, I knew that reality was measured in pounds and ounces, feet and inches, chains and furlongs and acres and miles and strange biblical quantities like cubits.

Outside of his workshop, my father's only apparent aim was to get through life as quietly and inconspicuously as possible. As far back as I could recall, my parents had slept apart, though they must, presumably, have shared a bed at least once. His room was as bare as a monk's cell. Board floor, single bed, bedside locker, wardrobe, chest of drawers. And one upright chair. No secrets there. On top of the chest of drawers he kept a framed photograph of my mother, one of the few we had, standing on the front porch in her twinset and sensible shoes, doing her best to smile. As if she were on the other side of the world instead of across the hall. They called each other dear, and never quarrelled within my hearing. Every morning he would collect the lunch she had packed for him and set off for the Land Surveys Department. He dug the vegetable garden, serviced the car, and did the household repairs. The rest of his time he spent with his trains.

They were nominally mine at first: 00 gauge electric, on a six by four baseboard in a corner of the garage. An oval track with an inside loop, a siding, two stations, and a tunnel through a papier mâché mountain. I was bored within hours; he doubled the outside track; after a few more hours I lost interest again. We all went on speaking of 'Gerard's trains' for years as the baseboard expanded and the tracks tripled and quadrupled below the signals and gantries and water towers, and the engines and rolling stock multiplied until our car was eased out into the carport, never to return despite the threat of rust. He bought an old kerosene heater for the winters, then a second-hand air conditioner for the ferocious summer heat. The baseboard grew until there was only a narrow walkway down each side to his stationmaster's quarters at the far end, where he had his workbench and his electric jug, an old brown leather swivel chair, and row after row of switches and levers and dials, all labelled according to a code that he carried around in his head. Everything on the board was electrified: not just the trains, but lights, points, signals, level crossings, even miniature bells. He bought his components-boxes of relays and solenoids and rheostats and endless coils of coloured wire-at army surplus sales and government auctions, swap meets with other train men. When the air conditioner wasn't running you could hear the hum of the transformers.

Every line had its own timetable, and all of the stations had English village names like East Woking or Little Barnstaple, but the network wasn't a map or a model; it was a self-contained, perfectly ordered world, every tiny detail meticulously crafted to scale, except that it contained no human figures. Some train men have crowds of miniature people waiting on platforms, fields full of minutely hand-painted porcelain cows: my father's universe was populated only by trains. If it hadn't been for your mother's nerves', I think he might have moved into the shed altogether; as it was, he brought the last train into the depot at 10.27 each night and retired dutifully to his bedroom. He and I were always going to have a bit of a talk about things' but we still hadn't quite got around to it on the night, just before my eighteenth birthday, when he didn't come in at 10.30, or eleven, and she found him dead in his stationmaster's chair, with a single train running at full speed, round and round the outermost track.

IF I HAD SEEN PICTURES OF STAPLEFIELD, THEY MIGHT HAVE cramped my imagination of it, suffused with depths and subtleties of colour unknown in Mawson. Memories of Staplefield-my memories, as they truly seemed, for my mother's stories had left me with such an acute visual sense of the place that I could walk around it in my head, fix my attention anywhere I pleased, the forge in the village street, or Viola, upright, elegant and silver-haired, seated at her walnut writing-desk, the two attic bedrooms with their gabled windows and dark wooden floorboards and Persian rugs, the view southwards over the fields from the pavilion on the hillside, and see every detail plain-these memories became my principal refuge as the miseries of Mawson Junior High crowded in. Until I met (for want of a better word) my invisible friend, Alice Jessell.

The letter arrived on a hot, airless, overcast morning towards the end of the summer holidays. I was thirteen and a half. My last days of freedom were slipping by. For weeks it had been too hot to do anything except lie on my bed reading or just listening to the rattle and creak of the fan as it swung to and fro, alternately wishing the time away and willing it to slow down. Nothing to look forward to but another year trailing after the legion of the lost: the swots, the cowards, the hopeless at sport. I heard the tinny put-putting of the postman's motorbike through my window and slouched out to the letter-box, just for something to do.

Apart from the usual bills and circulars, my parents received very little mail, and nothing at all from overseas except the occasional invitation to join a book or record club. Until that day, I don't think I'd ever seen a letter addressed to me. This one had my full name on it: Master Gerard Hugh Freeman. I slid the letter into the pocket of my shorts just before my mother followed me out the front door, and handed her whatever else the postman had brought.

Penfriends International, it said in typewriting at the top. PO Box 294, Mount Pleasant, London WC1. By Airmail. Inside was a letter, also typewritten beginning Dear Gerard, asking me if I would like a penfriend, and if so, whether a girl or a boy. All I had to do was write to the Secretary, Miss Juliet Summers, telling her something about myself to help her find me my ideal penfriend, and return my answer in the enclosed airmail envelope.

I knew exactly what my mother would say. But Miss Juliet Summers sounded warm and friendly, and I ended up writing her several pages-I even talked about Staplefield-asking her to find me a girl penfriend. I did the whole thing in a rush, knowing I mustn't give myself time to think, so that it was only on my way back from the post office that I realised my mother would almost certainly see the reply before I did.

Sure enough, when I got home on the Friday of the first dismal week of school, she was hovering in the hall, clutching an envelope. The skin around her nostrils looked taut and shiny.

'There's a letter for you, Gerard,' she said accusingly. 'Shall I open it for you?'

'No. Can I have it please, Mother?'

This would normally have been met with 'No thank you, Mother-she hated 'Mum' and would not have the word in the house-and 'May I have it please, Mother?' But today she just stood there, glancing from me to the envelope, which she was holding so that I could not see the writing on it.

Suddenly I understood that, for the first time in my life, the high moral ground was mine.

'Please may I have my letter now; Mother?' I repeated.

Slowly, reluctantly, she held it out to me. 'Penfriends International'. The envelope was crumpled where her finger and thumb had gripped it.

'Thank you, Mother,' I said, retreating towards my room. But she was not finished with me.

'Gerard, have you been giving anyone our address?'

'No, Mother.'

'Then how did they know where to send it?'

I was about to say, I don't know, when I saw where this was leading. Taking a letter from the box and answering it without telling her, even a letter addressed to me, would count as being sneaky and dishonest. I could feel the high moral ground subsiding beneath me.

'I-I saw it on a noticeboard at school,' I improvised. 'About the penfriends.'

'Did Mrs Broughton give you permission to write to them?'

'No, Mother, I just… wanted a penfriend.'

'So you did give them our address.'

'I s'pose so-yes,' I muttered, choosing what seemed the lesser evil.

'You had no right to do that. Without asking me first. And where did you get the stamp?'

'I bought it with my pocket money.'

'I see… Gerard'-in her take-no-prisoners voice of command-'I want you to show me that letter.'

I was afraid that if I did, I would never see it again.

'Mother, you've always said that letters are private… why aren't I allowed to read my own letter?' My voice broke upwards into a squeak on the last word.

Her colour rose; she glared, turned on her heel and walked away.

THE LETTER WAS TYPED, BUT IT WAS NOT FROM MISS Summers.

Dear Gerard,

I hope you don't mind, but Miss Summers sent me your letter to read (she sent lots of others too, but yours was the only one I really liked), and you sounded so much like the penfriend I've been hoping for that I asked her if I could write straight back to you myself. Of course you don't have to answer if you don't like the sound of me!

My name is Alice Jessell, I'll be fourteen this March and like you I'm an only child, except that both my parents are dead, we were in a car crash together. I know maybe I shouldn't write this bit straight away but I want to get it over with. Anyway you might not want to read any more, so it's only fair, as long as you know that I'm definitely not looking for sympathy and I don't ever, ever want you to feel sorry for me, just to be my penfriend if you'd like to. So as I was saying my parents were both killed in the accident, which happened about three years ago. I survived because I was in the back seat, but my spinal cord was damaged so I can't walk. My arms are OK though-I only type because my writing's really hard to read, and already I can type much faster than I could ever write. And because we didn't have any relatives or anything I had to go into a home-I know how awful this must sound and of course it was unbelievably unbearably awful at first. But it's a really lovely place, in the countryside, in Sussex. The insurance money pays for me to be here, I even have my own lessons so I don't have to go to school, and a beautiful upstairs room all to myself, looking out over fields and trees and things.

So now I've said it. I really do mean it, about not wanting sympathy, I want you to think of me if you can-only if you want to be my friend of course-as a normal person who just wants to share normal things. I don't watch TV or listen to pop music I'm afraid but I love reading-it sounds as if you do too and I'd love to have someone my own age to talk about books with. (Most of the other people here are very nice, but much older than me.) And to sort of be part of someone else's life, and be their friend. Anyway that's enough about that.

There's snow on the fields right now, but it's a bright sunny day, there are squirrels running up and down the big oak tree outside my window, and three plump little birds on the windowsill, they're singing so loudly I can hear them over the clatter of the keys! Actually where I am sounds a little bit like the place where your mother grew up-a big red brick house in the countryside with woods and fields around it. Mawson sounds awfully dry and hot! Sorry, that sounds a bit rude, I mean I'm sure its lovely, just so different from here.

Anyway I'd better stop and give this to Matron (she's more like an aunt, really) to send on to Miss Summers, that's because Penfriends International are a sort of charity, they pay the airmail postage. So if you want to, write to me care of Miss Summers, and then every time she sends on one of your letters to me, she'll enclose some reply coupons to post back to you-that way you won't have to buy stamps. Our letters will be completely private.

I really must stop right now. Before I panic and crumple this up for maybe making a complete idiot of myself.

Sincerely,

Alice

P.S. I think Gerard is a really nice name.

I lay on my bed and read Alice's letter over and over again. She sounded incredibly, unbelievably brave, and yet I realised I truly didn't feel sorry for her. Sympathy, yes; but even though being an orphan in a wheelchair did sound unbearably awful, her letter made me feel as if I'd come in out of the dark on a freezing night, not knowing how cold I'd been until I felt the heat of the fire.

Reading other people's letters is a terrible sin. But it hadn't stopped me from trying to open that drawer again. I looked around my room for a hiding-place. Under my mattress? On top of my wardrobe? Behind the books in my bookcase? Nowhere was safe. I thought again about how brave Alice must be, and felt suddenly ashamed of being thirteen and a half, starting second year high school and still too scared to tell my mother that yes, I did have a penfriend, and no, I wasn't going to show her my letter.

But facing the full blast of my mother's disapproval at dinner that night, I also had to face, for the thousandth time, the fact that I really was a coward.

'Mother I want to, I mean please may I-write to my um…'

'You will not be writing to anyone, Gerard. I'm still waiting for you to give me that letter.'

'Mother, you've always told me it's wrong to read other people's…' Again my voice betrayed me. My mother was visibly swelling. Sensing imminent meltdown, my father concentrated on his chop-bone.

'I am going to read that letter, because you are going to give it to me. Who is this penfriend, anyway?'

'She's-she's a-'

'A girl? You won't be writing to any girl, Gerard, not until I've seen that letter and written to her mother myself.'

'She doesn't have a mother,' I blurted. 'She's an orphan-in a home.' It felt like betraying Alice, but I saw where my only chance lay.

'And where is this home?'

'In-in the countryside.'

'That letter came from London,' she snapped.

'They send them on-Penfriends International-and pay the postage-for children who-children like Alice who don't have parents.'

'You mean it's a charity?'

I nodded eagerly. My mother was silent for a moment. She looked faintly uncomfortable.

'Oh. Well of course I'll have to write to them first… but I suppose… yes, go and get that letter please. And then we'll see.'

Just when I thought I'd wriggled off the hook.

'Mother-' I began hopelessly.

'It's his letter, Phyllis.'

My mother could not have looked more astonished if the fruit bowl had spoken on my behalf. Her mouth opened, but no sound came out. My father looked equally startled.

'I'll go and get the address,' I said in an inspired moment, knowing she would never let up until she had at least written to Juliet Summers.

My mother nodded dumbly, and I left them staring at each other in utter bewilderment.

After I'd dried the dishes I went out to the garage and asked my father if I could have a box with a lock 'to keep some of my stuff in'. He seemed determined to behave as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened, but he gave me a stout metal toolbox and a shiny new padlock and key, and we spent the rest of the evening playing trains. I felt sure he knew what I was really thanking him for.

I STARTED MY FIRST LETTER TO ALICE THAT SAME NIGHT AND continued most of the weekend, pages and pages written straight down as if I were talking to her, everything about my confrontation with my mother, about school and its miseries, all of my likes and dislikes, and much more about Staplefield, how much it meant to me and how my mother had refused to talk about it after I found the photograph in her room. I wrote compulsively, as if from dictation, knowing I mustn't re-read what I'd said, or let myself think about what I was doing. And spent the next fortnight in a torment of hope and fear, until her answer arrived and I knew for certain it would be all right.

MY MOTHER NEVER TOLD ME WHETHER SHE'D WRITTEN TO Juliet Summers. She acted as if the letters I would find waiting on my desk when I got home from school had materialised without her knowledge. Part of me longed to win back her approval, but I also knew that if I once spoke of Alice, I would never be able to stop until every last detail had been dragged out for inspection on the kitchen table.

So our silence over Staplefield came to include Alice. But now I had Alice to write to, and she never tired of hearing about Staplefield. Or, it seemed, anything to do with my life. It was almost as if she was writing from Staplefield, for the view from her window reminded me constantly of the landscape my mother used to describe: the formal garden below, with tall trees rising up to her window, then the patchwork of green fields, leading to steep wooded hills in the near distance.

Of course I wanted to know exactly where she was, so I could look it up in the atlas. But from the beginning Alice laid down certain rules.

Gerard I need you to understand why I don't want to talk about my life before the accident. I love my parents, I think about them all the time. Often I feel they're very close, watching over me, corny though that sounds. But to survive I had to let go of everything before the accident. My friends, all my stuff, everything. The only thing I brought with me was my favourite photo of my parents, it's here on my desk as I'm writing this. As if-this is going to sound awfully weird I know-as if I died with them and went on to a sort of after-life, only still here on earth, like a reincarnation only different. I knew if I tried to hide under a blanket of pity I'd smother. And to throw off the blanket I had to throw off everything.

Of course if I had brothers and sisters and relatives I'd have no choice. But then I'd be the family cripple, and I don't think I'd want to go on living. This way I'm just a girl who happens to need a wheelchair to get around. Not a cripple or a paraplegic or a disabled person, just me. I'm really mobile, I do everything for myself. And the people here are wonderful, apart from physiotherapy and stuff like that they treat you as completely normal.

But I have been very lonely and your letters make all the difference. They light up my life.

Now for the difficult part. I don't want to tell you exactly where I am, because…(there's been a really long pause here, I've watched a girl and boy, they look about our age, walking across the fields with their arms round each other, all the way from the footpath outside our garden wall to the edge of the forest, wondering how to say this the way I mean it) well for the same reason I don't want to send you a photo of me. (For a start I don't have any, but that's not why of course.) And it's not because I'm hideously disfigured or anything, I don't actually have any scars at all.

No it's because a picture would have to be a picture of me in my chair, or anyway of me not able to walk, and I don't want you to see me that way. I'm afraid you'll feel sorry for me. I do hope you'll understand, even though-this really is unfair, I know-I'd love to have a picture of you (and of your parents, and the house where you live, only if you'd like to of course). In exchange I'll try to honestly answer anything you ask me about how I look.

If by some miracle I get to walk again, then I'll send you a picture. But until then I want to be

your invisible friend

love Alice

PS This is really vain I know. But I just realised you might think I'm sixteen stone and covered in acne or something like that. In fact I'm only just seven stone and-well not totally hideous anyway.

PPS If I'm honest that's not the only reason-about not sending my photo I mean. I don't want to be fixed by a picture. However you want to think of me, that's the way I'd like you to.

I had been avoiding the subject of photographs, because the thought of Alice seeing my sticking-out ears and banded teeth was too humiliating to bear. So I assured her I did understand (which was only half true); and that I was sensitive about my bands, so could we both stick to word-pictures (hoping as I wrote this that she wouldn't ask any searching questions about ears, hair, spots, freckles, knees, teeth or indeed anything much to do with my physical appearance).

Far from pitying her, I often caught myself forgetting all about the wheelchair and the loss of her parents, contrasting the beauty of her surroundings with the drab suburban desolation of mine, wishing, passionately, that I could be there with her wherever exactly 'there' in Sussex might be. After those early letters, she wrote, for most of the time, as if her injury didn't exist, as if she were a young heiress living alone in a mansion, with her own private tutors, taking herself for outings, as she called them, whenever the weather was fine. They certainly had a wonderful library at the home, because no matter what book I mentioned, if she hadn't already read it she would have by the time her next letter arrived. Besides, our situations were, in many respects, remarkably similar. My parents had never had a television, didn't read magazines, and bought the local paper only on Saturdays, for the advertisements. They took no interest in politics, or news beyond the boundaries of Mawson. Occasionally, my mother would listen to classical music on the radio. But mostly she and I just read, in silence.

Which was exactly how Alice spent her days, when she wasn't having lessons or out in the garden: reading, and gazing out of her window. Even at fourteen, she seemed to have outgrown all the usual teenage interests, whereas I hadn't even started on them. Just before we met-the word she always preferred-I had been trying to develop an interest in rock music. But as soon as I learned that Alice didn't like any kind of pop music-she said anything with a beat made her feel as if she'd drunk too much coffee-I gave up the pretence. I stopped trying to fit in with anyone. Instead of trailing miserably round the schoolyard, trying to avoid being beaten up, I stayed in the library every lunch hour, doing my homework, so that I could spend the evenings in my room writing to Alice. Gradually, I became aware that I wasn't being picked on nearly as often; and despite the amount of time I spent writing to, and dreaming about, Alice, my grades actually improved.

My outdoor life was almost as constrained as hers, bounded by my mother's pathological dread of what would happen to me if I strayed from the narrow path that led from home to school (and post office) and back. But now that I had Alice, I no longer felt confined: gazing out of my own window, I would find myself staring through, rather than at, the rusty metal cladding of Mr Drukowicz's massive shed, to the woods and meadows of-as I would often catch myself imagining-Staplefield.

BUT OF COURSE I BEGAN TO WANT MORE, MUCH MORE: TO see Alice, to hear her voice, to hold her. I told her that I prayed every day (even though I didn't think I really believed in God) that her spine would heal or that the doctors would find a cure. 'I'm glad you do,' she replied, 'but I mustn't think about it. They told me I'll never walk again, and I've accepted that.' So I went on praying, and didn't mention it again. I would happily have spent my life savings on one short phone call, but she wouldn't allow that either. She didn't-at first-encourage any endearments or professions of love from me beyond 'Dear Alice' and 'Love, Gerard', and yet she told me, in almost every letter, that I was the closest, most important person in her life.

She did, however, keep her promise to answer honestly anything I asked about her appearance, even though she said it embarrassed her and she was very much afraid I'd think her vain. She admitted that her hair was long, and curly (she called it frizzy), and thick, and 'a sort of reddy-chestnut-brown colour', that she had very pale skin, dark brown eyes, and 'a nose that's really straight but looks as if it's just a little bit turned-up'. And though I'd been too shy to ask, she volunteered, 'just to get it over with', that her legs were quite long-and her waist quite small, 'and otherwise I suppose people would say I was quite well-developed for my age, and now I've embarrassed myself quite enough for one letter, my face is burning and I'm not saying any more'.

In other words, she looked like a goddess. A goddess who mostly wore jeans and T-shirts but sometimes, just for a change, put on one of her long dresses, 'like the one I'm wearing today, which is white and musliny and gathered at the waist, with small purple flowers embroidered over the bodice'. Apart from the obvious fact that she was stunningly beautiful, I learned, from her letters, the impossibility of capturing an individual face in words alone. My imagination of her remained both painfully vivid and tantalisingly blurred.

Then one lunch hour in the school library I found a book of paintings, mostly black and white but with a section of colour plates in the middle. They'd only just catalogued it, so the women in the pictures hadn't yet been equipped with beards, moustaches, monstrous breasts and grotesque genitals in livid Texta-Colour-you weren't allowed to borrow the art books, but that didn't save them. I turned over The Last of England and there was The Lady of Shalott, at whom I gazed, transfixed, for many minutes: this was surely Alice.

Before the afternoon bell rang I had discovered the Pre-Raphaelites, and found at least a dozen more Alices. She seemed to have modelled for the entire Brotherhood, but they weren't all equally good at painting her. Rossetti could do her hair, but he'd given her a mean mouth; Burne-Jones could do her face very well, but the hair wasn't quite right, and besides he'd painted her naked, emerging from a tree, for some reason, with her arms around an almost equally naked youth: I only dared glance at that one and pass hastily on, afraid that Mrs McKenzie the librarian would catch me. Millais's The Bridesmaid was close, but I kept turning back to The Lady of Shalott, and thinking that if only she could manage to look a little less tragic, the likeness would be perfect.

I told Alice that same night, and when at last her reply came it turned out that she already knew the picture, and yes, she supposed she did look a bit like the Lady of Shalott, except that she thought her hair was darker than the Lady's, and of course the Lady was much better-looking; whereas I felt certain the comparison was quite the other way round. I invested most of my savings in a book of Waterhouse's pictures, which I managed to smuggle home after one of our rare trips to Mawson Central Shopping Mall. Sex was not merely a taboo subject in our house; we had always lived according to the pretence-made possible by the absence of television and magazines-that no such thing existed. And even though Waterhouse's naked nymphs were Art, I knew my mother would not see them that way, any more than I did.

AND THEN I HAD THE DREAM. IT WAS LATE SUMMER, TWO years since we'd started writing. I woke-or so I thought-in bed in my own room, everything the same except that a full moon was shining through my window. A strange moon, because its light was soft and golden, like candlelight, and warm against my face. An impossible moon, because my window faced south and the sky was blotted out by the side of Mr Drukowicz's shed, but in the dream it seemed absolutely right and natural. I lay there for a little while, feeling the warmth of its rays, until I became aware that the source of the warmth, which was now filling my whole body, was much closer than the moon.

I turned my head on the pillow. Alice lay facing me, smiling the most enchanting smile, a smile of pure joy and tenderness and love. Her head was only a few inches from mine, her red-gold-chestnut hair rippling over the pillow in the candle-moonlight, our bodies not quite touching, and for a small eternity I just lay there, floating in perfect bliss. She did not look exactly like the Lady, or any of the women in the paintings; she was simply Alice, and beautiful, and the warmth of her body flowed into mine as our lips brushed and met and I woke in my wet pyjamas, alone, to the familiar patch of neon from the streetlight spilling across the wall of Mr Drukowicz's shed. It was 1.30 in the morning.

Always before, scrubbing at my pyjamas and sheets by torchlight, I'd felt nothing but shame and dread that this time-for the stains were always horribly visible in the morning-my mother would say something. But that night I went through the routine almost absent-mindedly, praying that I would float straight back into the dream, and Alice radiant beside me.

Instead I lay sleepless for a long time, struggling in vain to recapture her face as I had seen it, the glow fading until there were only the faces from the paintings left, and I buried my own face in my pillow and wept.

As I was finally drifting in and out of sleep, I had another dream, of myself as a very small child, being read to on my mothers knee, in lamplight on our couch at night. My mother was in her dressing-gown, which made it feel very late, and she was reading from a book with no pictures, a story I didn't understand at all, but I sat listening intently just the same, following the cadences of her voice. I was watching from outside, as if my older self were sitting invisibly on the couch beside them. Then I saw that my mother was crying silently as she read. Tears were streaming down her face and splashing over my pale blue sleeping suit, but she made no attempt to wipe them away; she just went on reading and the tears went on falling until I woke again briefly to find my own pillow still damp from the tears I had shed for Alice.

ON THE SATURDAY MORNING AFTER THE DREAM, I FOUND myself alone in the house. My father was at a train men's swap meet on the other side of town; my mother had run herself late for the hairdresser. I came out into the hall when I heard the front door slam, and saw that she had-most unusually-left the door to her room open. As I moved closer my gaze fell upon the drawer I had opened on that stifling January afternoon.

My unspoken pact with my mother had kept me away from her room before this. I won't pry into your secrets if you don't pry into mine. But the door was open, and Alice was so fascinated by Staplefield, and Viola, and anything I could remember about the photograph I had found.

The drawer was still locked, and there was no small brass key in any of the obvious places. Then I remembered that the tongue-or whatever the bit that worked the lock was called-had been nothing more than a plain metal tag with a slot cut in the front end of it. So I went around the house collecting and trying keys from other pieces of furniture until I found one that fitted.

The lock clicked over. Kneeling in the half-light, breathing mothballs and insect spray and the faint doggy smell of the carpet, I saw my uneasy reflection staring from the depths of the dressing-table mirror. Gerard is so like his mother.

The envelope and the photograph had gone. The only thing in the drawer was the book with the faded grey paper cover, mottled with reddish brown spots. The Chameleon-I still didn't know what a chameleon was but I recognised the word-A Review of Arts and Letters. Volume I, Number 2, June 1898. Edited by Frederick Ravenscroft. Essays by Richard Le Gallienne and G.S. Street. Poems by Victor Plarr, Olive Custance, and Theodore Wratislaw. I tried to open it and discovered that the pages were joined together at the edges. Except for one section. 'Seraphina: A Tale', by V.H.

Seraphina

LORD EDMUND NAPIER LIKED EVERYthing about him pleasant and agreeable, and since he was rich, handsome, unmarried, and possessed of a splendid town house in Cheyne Walk, the world made haste to oblige him. Indeed it had been hastening-with one disagreeable exception, as we shall presently learn-almost from the moment of his birth some forty years before the afternoon upon which we find him gazing at a blank space on the wall of his private gallery.

Though the main entrance hall and staircase of his house were adorned, as might be expected, with portraits of Napiers past, this gallery was known only to Lord Edmund's most intimate associates. It was a long, vaulted, panelled room, reminiscent in its proportions of a place of worship, but lit so as to draw in as much natural illumination as possible while excluding any direct glare. The merest glance around the walls, however, would reveal Lord Edmund to be, as the phrase goes, a devotee of the female form, lavishly and variously illustrated by over a hundred canvases running the length of the gallery on either side, and supplemented by numerous pieces of statuary in bronze, marble, jade, ebony, and other precious materials; all, I hasten to add, in the finest of taste; the finest, indeed, that money could buy. But to describe Lord Edmund as a worshipper at the shrine of Beauty would be, if not precisely untrue, at least a shade discourteous. A gentleman predestined to adorn the very pinnacle of society cannot but be conscious of his own perfections; and it would be fairer to say that Lord Edmund and Beauty had long been on intimate terms. And this, paradoxical as it may seem, was the source of a certain discontentment on his side, and the reason why the wall at the northern end of the gallery, farthest from the great double doors which opened onto its vaulted length, the very space in which the finest flower of his collection ought to have been displayed, remained obstinately blank. He had, over the years, tried any number of canvases in the place of honour, but none had ever quite sustained that pitch of perfection he had, almost unwittingly, come to require of its subject.

Lord Edmund himself could scarcely have accounted for his single state, which nevertheless remained a topic of lively interest to every fashionable hostess with marriageable daughters at her disposal. Many a matron had fancied her favourite as good as engaged to his lordship, only to discover, just as she thought him safely landed, that the catch had unaccountably slipped the net, and so adroitly as to leave her without even the consolation of an action for breach of promise. In truth his lordships heart had only ever been engaged on one occasion, and that many years ago, when he was but four and twenty. The match was impossible: Miss Eleanor Brandon, though undeniably beautiful and sweet-natured (and, it must be admitted, far more cultivated and better read than the youthful Edmund himself) possessed neither family nor fortune; worse, she nurtured artistic ambitions, accepting whatever was offered her in the way of scenery-painting and the like around the studios of Chelsea. She had, at the time of their meeting, an impoverished suitor some ten years older than herself, a portrait painter constitutionally incapable of fulfilling any of the few commissions offered him; to whom, nevertheless, she was on the verge of committing her affections. But youth and charm prevailed; so entirely that Edmund could not but be swayed by the force of her love for him. He did not-at least in retrospect-believe that he had explicitly pledged himself to her; but he did speak privately to his father, the earl, who forbade not only the match, but any further association with Miss Brandon.

Edmund was of age, and sole heir, and could have defied his parent, but severe financial constraint, and a great deal of unpleasantness, would certainly have followed. What was a fellow to do? He owed Miss Brandon, at the very least, the courtesy of an interview; but that would certainly upset her, and therefore him, so how could it benefit either? And if his father were to hear of it… no; a letter was the obvious thing; but it proved so devilish difficult to compose that he was forced to abandon the attempt. An emissary: now there was an idea; a good friend upon whose delicacy and discretion he could absolutely rely; indeed, he knew the very man for the task. But the very man was so far affected by Miss Brandon's distress as to charge his friend with cruel and unmanly conduct; which led, inevitably, to a breach between them, and left the matter still unresolved. Perhaps he really ought to see her, come what may… and if only his fathers temper, uncertain at the best of times, had not been so vile of late, he really thought he would have gone.

So the days stretched into weeks without anything decisive being done, until one afternoon, when he had just concluded a painful exchange with his father on the subject of his expenditure, and was about to set forth in search of new distractions, a footman informed them that there was a young person at the front door, refusing to accept that Edmund was not at home, and insisting upon an interview. With a sinking heart, he descended the stair, his father immediately behind him. Eleanor's pale, stricken face was terrible to behold; still worse, the momentary joy transfiguring her expression when she saw that it was he. She moved as if to embrace him; transfixed by the baleful presence looming at his back, he could only stammer and retreat, until the door was closed against her. That evening he learned that a young woman had flung herself off Battersea Bridge and drowned. It was Eleanor; and the coroners jury, hearing that she was with child, brought in a verdict of suicide while the balance of her mind was disturbed.

EDMUND'S NAME WAS NOT CONNECTED WITH THE tragedy. He was sent immediately abroad, where he remained for some months until his father resolved to settle all outstanding differences between them by dying of apoplexy. At first, his conscience troubled him sorely, but like other young men of wealth and title he learned to subdue it through the strenuous pursuit of pleasure, until everything about him was once again pleasant and agreeable. Eleanor's face, overlaid by so many others, faded from his memory, until he had only the vaguest recollection of her appearance. By the time of his fortieth birthday, she had not crossed his mind for years.

He would have counted himself the most fortunate of men, were it not for a certain restlessness, a-not precisely boredom, but a feeling that the world had lost something of its charm. Often, of late, he had found himself neglecting the manifest delights of his gallery in favour of the empty wall, as if by sheer intensity of scrutiny he could divine, beneath the faint sheen of panelled oak, those lineaments of face and form which yet eluded him. Such was his absorption in this pursuit that he would wake, as it were, to find that upwards of an hour had vanished, leaving him restless and unsettled, incapable of responding to the voluptuousness all about him, seeking only to escape from gallery and house alike and lose himself in the great city, walking away the hours until it came time to return and dress for his evening engagements.

SO IT WAS, ON THE AFTERNOON IN QUESTION, THAT Lord Edmund emerged from his front door, turned, as was his invariable custom, left into Cheyne Walk, and set off mechanically towards Royal Hospital Road, vaguely intending to stroll up Ebury Street and take a turn around Green Park. It was a bright, clear, spring day; a light breeze, cool and invigorating, ruffled the surface of the river. Still brooding on-he knew not exactly what-he had almost reached his turning when his attention was caught by a solitary figure on the other side of the Embankment, some fifty paces ahead of him and moving in the same direction. A tall, slender, female figure, evidently youthful to judge from a certain sinuous freedom of movement, clad in what appeared to be a soft pale gown, trimmed with dark blue or purple, and crowned by-plain even at this distance-an extraordinary cloud-no other phrase would do for it-an extraordinary cloud of auburn hair which seemed to swirl and float about her as she moved.

Not, it must be admitted, for the first time in such a circumstance, Lord Edmund abandoned his intended route and quickened his pace along the Embankment, meaning to come up with the young woman on his side of the road and then-see what might be made to follow. But despite his best efforts, and without any visible acceleration on her part, the distance between them unaccountably refused to diminish. She betrayed not the slightest awareness of his interest; such was the abundance of the auburn cloud that he could not tell where her attention was directed, but she certainly had not turned her head towards him. She maintained, to all appearances, the same easy, sinuous, unselfconscious gait, and yet by the time they passed Chelsea Bridge he was stumbling between a rapid walk and an undignified trot; flushed, overheated, and altogether captivated. So they continued all the way along Grosvenor Road to Vauxhall Bridge, onto which, to his surprise, she turned, proceeding across the river at the same deceptive pace, still so surrounded by the radiant cloud of hair that despite the altered angle of vision he could see nothing of her face.

Lord Edmund now crossed over, and made his way in turn onto the bridge, noting as he did so that the tide was very low. To his perplexity and dismay, he saw that the distance between himself and his quarry had, if anything, increased. Had they been alone, he would have broken into a run, but there were other persons on the bridge, and, indignity aside, the spectacle of a gentleman in hot pursuit of an unaccompanied young lady might lead to worse humiliations. Yet, even hastening as fast as he dared, he could see all too plainly that his cause would soon be lost. He was not half-way over, yet there was her dwindling figure almost at the far side; he absolutely could not reconcile her unhurried rhythm of movement to the speed with which she was now eluding him. And what on earth could prompt her to turn, as her choice of descent began to indicate, in the direction of Lambeth, surely a most unsuitable destination for one such as her?

The auburn cloud vanished from sight, and a bitter desolation, sharper and more painful than any emotion he could recall, overwhelmed him. No; it was not to be borne; he must and would see her face, would speak to her. He looked wildly around for a hansom, but there was none in sight. Heedless of curious glances, he began to run. As he crossed the farther bank of the river, he thought-no, he was certain-he saw her disappearing into Vauxhall Walk. Thus began a chase which drew him further and further into noisome lanes and unfamiliar alleys, lured ever onwards by what was surely a flash of pale muslin, a swirl of bright hair floating like flame upon the unwholesome air, but always deceived until at last, winded, footsore, and defeated, he found himself leaning against a blank wall at the end of a dim, cobbled cul-de-sac. As the pounding in his ears subsided, he became aware of an uncanny stillness around him. There was not the faintest sight or sound of any inhabitant, not even the distant barking of a dog; the ragged crowds through which he had lately forced his way might have been a hundred miles off. The doors and windows along both sides of the alley were barred and shuttered; all but one, on closer inspection: a dingy shopfront above whose recessed doorway hung the triple symbol of the pawnbrokers trade.

Wearily, he pushed himself upright and made his way towards the shopfront, hoping at least to secure a cab, and perhaps find something palatable to quench his thirst. His footsteps rang loudly on the cobbles; the silence was really quite uncanny. Coming up to the shop window, he saw that it was so heavily layered with grime as to be entirely opaque. The door, however, stood slightly ajar. He pushed, expecting the stillness to be broken by the scrape of a lintel or the jangling of a bell, but it swung smoothly and noiselessly open.

He paused, irresolute at the threshold, willing his eyes to penetrate the gloom within. In the light from the open door he could discern the outlines of chairs and tables and other articles of furniture crowded and heaped high, one upon the other, so as to fill both sides of the room, leaving only a narrow central passageway receding into darkness. Scents of ancient timbers and musty fabrics, of decaying paper and chill metal, of dust and rot and mould, floated about him. It was not as he had imagined a pawnbrokers shop should be; there was no counter, no sign of a proprietor; only the heaped and crowded furniture and the artificial passage, scarce wide enough to admit him, into whose Stygian depths he continued vainly to peer. Lord Edmund was, of course, a man accustomed to command; in his natural surroundings it would never have occurred to him that his smallest wish would not be instantly and silently gratified, with scarce need of utterance on his part. But this was not Cheyne Walk, nor Napier Hall, nor even one of those more boisterous parts of town where gold could buy the service of any man-or woman. He stood mute, incapable either of advance or retreat, unmanned by darkness and silence.

How long he remained thus he could not tell, but a light began to glow dimly at the far end of the passage, or tunnel, as he perceived in the brightening gleam, for the aperture was not only framed but roofed over by the heaped furniture. Like a man under mesmeric compulsion, Lord Edmund found himself drawn into and along the passageway, which extended a surprising distance, given the mean proportions of shopfront and alley. As he emerged from the confinement of the tunnel, he was at first dazzled by the light of a single lantern held aloft by a motionless figure a few paces off to his left.

"Pray step forward, sir," said a grave, unexpectedly cultivated voice, "and let me know how I may be of service to you."

The figure resolved itself into a man of indeterminate age, somewhat below Lord Edmund's height, and slighter of figure, clean shaven, clothed in a plain dark suit like a manservant's. The lamplight fell upon a long, pale, melancholy face, indefinably wasted as if by prolonged illness or suffering, the eyes shadowed beneath a high forehead, the nose thin and aquiline, the lips almost bloodless. It was evident, despite the encircling gloom, that the man posed no threat to his lordship, who was about to inquire after hansom cabs and refreshments when his attention was caught by a large rectangular structure, a little to his right and taller than himself. As if anticipating a request, the proprietor-for who else could he be?-bore the lantern towards it, making, as he went, some adjustment which caused the light to brighten further. Lord Edmund, following, saw that the object was in fact a canvas, resting upon a frame; indeed a picture at least six feet in height. As the light came full upon it he caught his breath.

It was not like any picture he had ever seen, for the illusion of seeing through the frame, exactly as one looks through an open window to the view beyond, was, in the lamplight, absolute. He was staring at, or rather into, a woodland pool surrounded by dense foliage, and from this pool, with arms outstretched towards him, was emerging a marvellous naked woman of that preternatural beauty he had long despaired of encountering. Still more marvellously, her hair, though damp from recent immersion in the translucent waters that swirled about her waist, and thus falling dense about her shoulders rather than floating like flame upon the air, was of the exact, miraculous shade he had but lately pursued and lost. Whether this was the very same woman he could not tell; that she was the woman he had so long sought he had not the shadow of a doubt. Her expression seemed, at first glance, solemn and spiritual; but subtly endowed with the faintest of smiles, a hint of tender mockery, almost of invitation. He felt that he could gaze for ever into the fathomless depths of those dark eyes, upon the light caught in the minute droplets of water clinging to her lustrous flesh-but surely she breathed? Was that not a faint pulse in the delicate blue vein at her throat? Aroused, entranced, and altogether forgetful of his situation, even of the silent presence bearing the lamp, he stepped forward to claim his prize-and found himself confronted by unintelligible swirls and textures of pigment. He stepped back, and the miracle repeated itself; approached once more, and again the vision dissolved before his eyes.

"Who is she?" he inquired in a tone of wonder, more of himself than of his companion.

"Seraphina," replied the sombre voice at his back. The lamp silently approached and descended, illuminating a small bronze plate set into the base of the frame and engraved with that name in plain italic lettering.

"And-in life?" asked his lordship, still unable to take his eyes from the picture.

"There I cannot help you, sir."

"But surely she must…who then is the artist?"

"There too, sir, I am unable to enlighten you, save that I understand him to be deceased, and this to have been his only finished work."

"Then how… pray tell me, is it for sale?"

Lord Edmund had meant to pursue his inquiries further before raising the matter of purchase, but anxiety and impatience, a dread that he might not after all take possession of his hearts desire, had overmastered him.

"It is, sir."

"And-the price?"

"Twelve guineas, sir."

His lordships jaw dropped in astonishment. He knew full well the dangers of judging a work by artificial light, but here was no question of authenticity, only an anonymous miracle of brushwork; had the man said twelve thousand, he would have called for an emissary to secure a draft from his bankers by return.

"Twelve guineas!" he repeated incredulously. "You are sure…? That is to say, yes, I will take it. Now, if you please; in fact I have that sum about me." Lord Edmund was not one of those noblemen who count it an indignity to bear the currency of the realm upon their person; he took, rather, the view that an adventurous spirit never knew when a little gold might not come in handy.

"Very good, sir. If you would care to step this way, perhaps you will allow me to offer you some refreshment whilst I make the necessary arrangements."

Scarcely able to drag his gaze away from the picture, Lord Edmund reluctantly allowed the man to conduct him, not via the passage through which he had entered, but in the opposite direction, over what he vaguely perceived to be a flagged stone floor, past various shrouded objects, down another corridor and into a small office, into which a little natural light was filtering by way of a dusty pane. There were, of course, a dozen, a hundred more questions to be put, but somehow he found himself alone, settled in a chair with a glass of brandy in his hand before he had done more than-at his own insistence-complete the transaction and take possession of his receipt. In a remarkably short time, as it seemed to him, his reverie was disturbed, not by the proprietor, but by a man of coarser aspect entering via the street door-it seemed that the establishment spanned the entire distance between one lane and the next-to inform him that his purchase was secured and ready for conveyance. Lord Edmund looked out through the other door, whence the proprietor had left him; called several times, but received no answer. The silence remained unbroken; no trace of light appeared in the darkness of the corridor. He called once more, took a few ineffectual steps into the gloom, retreated, and gave it up. He had the picture safe, that was the main thing, and would return to satisfy his curiosity on the morrow.

ON THE WAY HOME, HOWEVER, LORD EDMUND WAS BESET by fear that the picture might prove a disappointment, or worse, a complete delusion, for the strangeness of the afternoons experiences did not fully manifest itself until they were jogging briskly along the Albert Embankment. It was only by an extreme effort of will that he restrained himself from signalling the cabman to stop, that he might tear the wrappings from the picture in full view of the street. By degrees he grew calmer, though he could not entirely rid himself of the sensation of having stumbled through a dream and back into the waking world, and it was with a pounding heart and a swimming sensation about his head that he watched the parcel transferred from the cabman's care into the gloved hands of his own servants. He had already resolved that, if he were not deceived, none but he would ever set eyes upon Seraphina again; she would be his, and his alone. Accordingly, he directed his men to hang the picture, still in its wrapping, in the place of honour at the head of his gallery, and withdraw, leaving him in sole possession-but of what? With trembling fingers he tore at the intervening knots, but was forced to employ a knife, in terror lest a slip of the hand should damage the picture. He was near fainting as he drew away the last of the wrappings and stepped away from the canvas.

He was not disappointed. Indeed, though he would have thought it impossible until that moment, the enchantment was stronger than before. All consciousness of his surroundings faded as his senses were once more ravished by Seraphina. Once more the sensation of gazing upon a living, breathing woman grew upon him; he could swear that the water rippling about her slender waist was actually moving; once again his senses impelled him forward; once again she vanished as completely as if a curtain had fallen swiftly and silently between them. He moved closer still, bewildered by the inscrutability of those ripples and swirls of pigment. On minute inspection, the surface of the picture was really quite uneven; in some places the weave of the canvas was plainly visible; in others the paint seemed to be thickly and crudely spattered in parti-coloured daubs, betraying no trace of the extraordinary, nay, the unprecedented skill that must have directed the artist's hand. How on earth was it done? He fixed his eye upon a dab of colour and moved slowly backwards. One pace… two… three, and the surface remained opaque; four, and the canvas seemed to dissolve seamlessly into rippling water, a verdant depth of forest, and lustrous Seraphina stretching out her arms as if to entreat him into her embrace with that faint but irresistible smile of invitation; Lord Edmund forced himself to take another pace back, and then another, but she did not vanish; the illusion of seeing beyond the frame as if a window had been let into the gallery wall remained as strong as ever, no matter how far, or at what angle, he retreated.

It was not until he stumbled and almost fell against a plinth, upon which stood a diminutive Aphrodite he had always thought especially pleasing, even by the exalted standard of his collection, that he was able to take his eyes from Seraphina and regain some awareness of his surroundings. One thing was instantly plain: she outshone everything else in the room as the full moon outshines the faintest stars. The canvases he had once admired were now revealed as drab and tawdry; beside the perfection of her flesh, his most delicate pieces of statuary, such as the Aphrodite he had nearly toppled, seemed coarse as sandstone. On the instant he knew what must be done. The gallery must be cleared, and forthwith. He would not look again upon Seraphina until it was done, until the last trace of her least rival (though even to speak of rivalry was absurd; as well ask whether a gas-lamp could rival the sun) had been effaced, and then, perhaps… he knew not quite what… He shook his head in an effort to clear it. To shroud her again in those coarse wrappings was not to be thought of. He would call for a length of the finest velvet, drape her as reverently and securely as he might, then set his entire staff to work to clear the gallery with the utmost possible speed. But where should he instruct them to store the contents? Well, it hardly mattered; the ballroom would do for the present; he would not be giving any more dances now that… again his head seemed to blur and spin. Perhaps, after such excitement, he needed a little air; as soon as the picture was suitably draped, he would give his instructions, and take a turn along the river while they were carried out.

The cool evening air did, at first, clear his head wonderfully, and he was swept along on a tide of self-congratulation. But the prospect of the Embankment, and the tranquil river beyond, brought him back to the afternoons pursuit with the full force of recall. That flaming hair and sinuous grace; the uncanny speed with which she had eluded him…"she" must, surely, be the model for Seraphina, for how else could she have led him to the very place where the picture awaited him? Though he could not, on reflection, claim with any certainty to have been led; beyond the entrance to Vauxhall Walk he could not positively swear to having traced her. Was it after all, merely a strange coincidence? Or had he been, in some mysterious way, practised upon? No; that made no sense; he had the picture safe… though he did not seem to be thinking so clearly after all; perhaps his adventures had taken a greater toll of his faculties than he had yet realised. At any rate, the thing to keep in mind was that the picture, however miraculous in execution, was nevertheless no more than a canvas which must, indubitably, have been painted from a living, breathing model; yes, surely the woman he had followed that very afternoon. All that remained, therefore, was to find her, and the obvious beginning was-to do at once what should have been done before he carried away his prize: resume his interrogation of the proprietor. He stepped into the road and secured an approaching hansom.

Here, however, a difficulty presented itself. He had assumed that the address would be inscribed upon the receipt which he had folded, without a glance, into his pocket-book. But on inspection it proved to be a crudely printed docket, devoid of any particulars save "Received for: 'Seraphina'; The sum of: Twelve guineas"-to which was appended an entirely illegible signature. Lord Edmund's journey proved altogether fruitless, despite the expenditure of more gold than had been laid out upon the picture itself, the enlistment of, as it seemed to him, half the population of Lambeth in the search, and the cabman's express willingness to drive all night, and investigate every cul-de-sac in the district, if it would please his lordship. But as night wore on the futility of proceeding impressed itself more and more firmly upon his lordship until, thinking himself wearier than the long-suffering cab-horse, he instructed his driver to turn for home.

SOME TWO MONTHS LATER, AT A LITTLE BEFORE TWELVE on a mild midsummer's night, Lord Edmund might have been observed slipping quietly away from a palatial residence in Hyde Park, having made his excuses on the ground of headache and general indisposition. All too visibly true, but utterly inadequate to the haggard and ghastly countenance illuminated by the street lamp, the fixed, sunken glare of the eyes, the frame from which all flesh appeared to have been stripped. Seraphina still awaited him in his gallery, poised for the hundredth, or was it the thousandth time, to ravish his senses until he could not but believe she lived, could not but take the fatal forward step, like a man drawn by vertigo to the very brink of a precipice and over, betrayed once more by those indecipherable whorls and ripples of pigment. Again and again he would find himself drawn into this dance of torment, and yet no matter how often he was compelled to perform its steps, he remained wholly in thrall to the conviction that this time he would at last take possession of warm, breathing flesh, feel the pressure of those perfect lips upon his own; and so his senses were wrought to a pitch of raging deprivation that Tantalus himself could scarcely have endured.

Lord Edmund was not, of course, quite in the position of a man dying of thirst in a desert, but he might as well have been, for beside Seraphina, all other women had become hateful to him; at the mere recollection of some of his former conquests, he would shudder like a man racked by poison. And when at last he could tear his gaze from hers, and flee from his denuded gallery out into the Embankment, he would instantly be seized by the contrary conviction: that the radiant vision he had just quitted was a mere painted shadow of the flesh and blood Seraphina who was surely, certainly, to be found somewhere close by. Never again, in waking life, had he so much as glimpsed the sinuous figure with the flame-coloured hair whom he had so long ago-as it now seemed to him-pursued. Instead he had become a figure of ridicule, the butt of jests and the subject of wagers, on every thoroughfare in Lambeth. He could fairly claim to have quartered every inch of ground, questioned every stallholder, visited every pawnbroking establishment in the district and far beyond, in vain; as vainly he had scoured his memory in the effort to recall the route he had taken on that fatal afternoon. Only in dreams could he retrace his steps, and then always, at the very doorway in the dim and silent alley, he would sense her presence at his back, and turning as she vanished, resume the chase, until his cries of "Seraphina" called him back into the waking world-and to his gallery.

Even so, he could not hate her, for she was too entirely beautiful to hate; but the force of his desire was equalled only by his detestation of the crudely pigmented surface he had so often and so fruitlessly examined. It seemed to grow uglier and cruder by the day; to become ever more completely the antithesis of the radiant perfection it concealed. More than once, Lord Edmund had caught himself in the attitude of a beast coiling itself to spring, with fingers bowed like talons eager to rend and tear the canvas. Only the terror of losing her for ever restrained him, for all the extremity of his torment, but he knew that he must very soon go mad, or die.

ON THE MIDSUMMER'S NIGHT ON WHICH WE REJOIN him, some residual instinct of self-preservation had goaded him into fulfilling an engagement to dine, as he had not done for many weeks. In any ordinary sense, the evening had proved disastrous: he had felt himself to be the object of universal and horrified concern, even repulsion, and could scarce summon so much as a phrase on his own account; his head had begun to ache from the moment of his arrival, and by the end was pounding as if a band of steel had been clamped around it. Nevertheless, the occasion had so heightened his awareness of his plight as to spur him to a desperate resolution: he would go directly home, enter his darkened gallery and destroy the picture, for no matter what torments might follow, they could not, surely, be worse than those that now assailed him.

He had intended to take a cab, but the prospect of confinement proved intolerable to him, and so he set off on foot. The night was at first overcast, but as he turned into Royal Hospital Road the moon broke through the clouds, and by the time he reached the Embankment it was shining full upon the tranquil surface of the river. His headache had not so much diminished as changed character, as though the steel band clamped about his temples had been drawn into a red-hot wire, strung through a point just above his right eye and tautened until the inside of his head rang with a high, shrilling note. As he reached his front door, it rose to an intolerable pitch. Seizing an antique dagger from a rack in the entrance hall, he stumbled towards his gallery and, shielding his eyes with one upraised arm, pushed open the great double doors.

He had imagined that the gallery would be entirely dark, but beneath the shielding arm he could see moonlight gleaming on the marble floor. His knees trembled as he approached the dais set before the painting; knowing that one glimpse of Seraphina would be his undoing, yet more appalled with every step by the enormity of what he was about to do. No, he could not; one last glimpse he must have; he lowered his arm.

By moonlight, the conviction that he gazed upon a living woman was more instantly compelling than ever. He saw the slight rise and fall of her breast, the subtle change in her expression as she caught sight of him; he knew her outstretched arms were opening to embrace him. The waters parted at her waist; the dagger slid from his hand and clattered upon the marble floor; he stepped forward. As he did so the moon passed behind a cloud, or so it seemed to him; at any rate the light momentarily failed. Something caught his foot; he fell; scrambling on all fours, he threw himself, as he prayed, towards her. But yes, at last, he was through; the miracle had happened; there she was arising like Venus from the water, with no intervening frame between them, though further off than he could have imagined from the other side. Unable to take his eyes from her, he missed his footing and plunged down a rocky slope. No matter; she was still there, closer now; he could see moonlight rippling on the water all around her. The shrilling in his head had softened into a high, sweet note, like that of a violin perfectly sustained, exquisitely drawn out. Her smile had never been more entrancing. Ascending to the very peak of passion, he reached the edge of the pool and leapt, unhesitating, into her embrace. But what was this choking taste of mud, and why could he not breathe? He tried to ask her to release his arms, but cold black water filled his lungs, and drew him down into the waiting dark.

AT THE INQUEST, A CABMAN TOLD THE CORONER THAT he had seen a gentleman racing, hatless, across Battersea Bridge, from which, about half-way over, he had vaulted into the river. The tide was running strongly, and by the time the witness had reached the edge of the embankment, there w^s nothing to be seen. The body was washed ashore several hundred yards downstream, entangled in a piece of netting. In deference to Lord Edmund's high position in society, the jury, despite some contrary evidence, accepted the argument that his lordship might have been deceived by moonlight into thinking he had seen some person in need of rescue, and returned a verdict of accidental death.

It only remains to add that, when his lordship's executors were ushered into his private gallery, they were quite bewildered as to why its late owner should have banished so many fine works in favour of a single canvas of no visible merit whatsoever. Certainly its title gave no clue as to its subject; indeed, it proved impossible even to determine what the artist had sought to depict. One member of the party ventured that it had been meant for clouds; his colleague said it put him in mind of a dense fog; the youngest and most suggestible of the trio thought that he could just discern, in the upper half of the canvas, the impression of a woman's features, with perhaps the faintest of smiles playing across her lips, but agreed that he could easily have been mistaken.

I READ THE STORY IN AN INTENSE, NERVOUS RUSH, crouched beside the open drawer, and went straight back to my room, as soon as The Chameleon was safely locked away again, to tell Alice about my discovery. But somehow the letter never got sent. Seraphina's resemblance to Alice as she had appeared in my dream was so disturbing that no matter what I wrote, it sounded as if I were subtly accusing her of something-I didn't quite know what-and the longer I left it the more difficult it became to explain why I hadn't mentioned the story before.

The morning after the dream, I had woken early and told Alice everything I could remember (except its sticky aftermath), and that I loved and adored her and could not live without the hope of seeing her as soon as I could earn the airfare and persuade my parents to let me go. And when, a fortnight later, I tore open the waiting envelope and saw 'Dearest Gerard' for the first time, I thought for a moment I had won.

Dearest Gerard,

Your dream of me was wonderful, I'm so glad you told me and there's more I want to say about how happy your letter made me and how much it means to me. And before anything else: yes, I love you too, I really do. And think about you, and dream of you-in fact I had a dream of you, like yours of me, only a little while ago, but I was too shy to tell you. Now I will, but first

This always happens when I come to a difficult bit, I've been staring out the window for ages, at the last of last week's snow melting where the field slopes up towards our hill, the one where the pavilion would be if this really were Staplefield. From inside my warm room it looks wonderfully inviting this morning, blue sky and bright sunlight, you can see very fine mist floating just above the wet grass, and I can hear cows lowing-mooing always sounds so-I don't know-too dumb and farmyardy, I think cows have such expressive eyes

Gerard you're forgetting I'll never be able to walk. I don't ever doubt your love for me but

there's a girl riding a horse along the footpath, wearing really smart riding clothes, beautifully cut, all fawns and tans and creams, she's really good-looking which sort of leads in to what I have to say

Sooner or later you're going to meet, I mean fall in love with a girl who can walk and run and swim and dance with you-and not just one, maybe lots of girls. I know you don't think so, you believe you'll always love me, but we have to be sensible, realistic. All those hateful words…

If I were braver I'd try to pretend to feel less, to make it easier for you. But I'm not that brave. I do love you, Gerard, and I know I'll be jealous when you fall in love with someone else. In fact I'd rather you didn't tell me when it happens-see, I'm already preparing myself-because I don't want us to stop writing whatever happens, and if I knew you were in love with another girl I might stop writing out of jealousy. Now it sounds as if I'm telling you to lie to me, which isn't what I wanted to say

I'll try again. If you could see me, you'd see the girl in the wheelchair, the paraplegic, the disabled person. All the labels. I don't think that's how you think of me now, but if you saw me you wouldn't be able to help it. It's not really sympathy I'm most afraid of. It's your disappointment. Us meeting and then breaking up. I couldn't bear that.

Do you know what happens to the Lady of Shalott, in the poem? She lives alone in her tower, quite content, weaving her magic web of colours. But she has a magic mirror that shows her the road to Camelot, knights and ladies and young lovers coming and going, and one day she sees Lancelot riding by, the handsomest of all the knights, and falls in love with him. The magic mirror cracks, the web breaks, she lies down in her boat and floats along the river to Camelot, singing until she dies.

Maybe my window is my magic mirror. I just think if we can be content with what we have, we might keep it for ever. You'll say-anyway you'll think-I'm a coward and maybe I am. But please try to understand, and go on loving me as we are.

Now I'll tell you my dream. It was after lunch, I was really tired, so I lay down on my bed and went to sleep. Then I dreamed I woke up and could move my legs-I often can, in dreams-and you were lying beside me, looking so beautiful-that's the only word that feels right-and so overjoyed to see me. Then we started kissing, and suddenly I realised that neither of us had any clothes on. This is why I was too shy to tell you before, but in the dream I wasn't shy at all, it just felt absolutely right. It felt wonderful, to be honest, so wonderful I-well anyway, then I woke up and cried for ages because you weren't there any more.

I do hope you'll understand. I'll always be, with all my heart,

Your invisible lover,

Alice.

P.S. My dream might even have been the same day as yours, only mine was in the afternoon and yours was at night. Wouldn't that be amazing?

And a fortnight later:

…How silly I forgot to say, I was so worried about the other part of that letter. Yes it was, it was Tuesday the 3rd of March when I had my dream-our dream-and of course you're right about the time being different, three o'clock in the afternoon for me was about half-past one the next morning for you. That's just so magical. I truly am, with all my heart

your invisible lover

Alice

At first I thought she was only waiting for me to persuade her. How could the wheelchair make any difference once we were lying together as we'd been in the dream? She must know how utterly I adored her. Gently, lovingly, she met every entreaty with the same reply. As things were, our love for each other was free, equal, and absolute, but if I were to meet the girl in the wheelchair it could never be truly equal; and if I ever fell out of love with her, I might stay, out of duty. And so on.

But in my daydreams and fantasies, Alice refused to stay in her wheelchair. It might begin at the door of her room; or I might come in through the formal garden, along the gravel path, up the front steps, between two great wooden doors standing open. There was never anyone else around: the house was always shrouded in tense, expectant silence. Along the echoing hall, up flight after flight of stairs until I reached her door, which like the front entrance was always open when I arrived. There I would see her sitting at her desk, which I knew was old and made of glowing red cedar, very like the colour of her hair, with a soft green leather top on which her typewriter sat. She would be gazing out of her window, a tall bay window with the desk in the centre of the alcove, wearing her long white dress with the embroidered purple flowers, her chin resting on the palm of her left hand, so absorbed that for a moment she wouldn't notice me standing quietly in the open doorway. And then she would push her wheelchair back from the desk, turn towards me with that enchanting smile I had struggled so often and so vainly to recall, and rise gracefully, effortlessly to her feet… and very soon, if I was safely alone in my room, we would be lying in each other's arms on the snowy white counterpane of her bed, her long legs entwined with mine in transports of bliss, and on to the inevitable solitary conclusion.

I tried everything, even blackmail. Didn't she long to see me and hold me and kiss me as much as I longed for her, to be lovers physically instead of only in dreams? Yes of course she did, but then we'd no longer be free, equal… and besides, she added, subtly turning the tables, did I really feel that we'd 'only' been together in dreams, when for her it was utter, blissful, ecstasy? Didn't I feel the same?

By the time I was seventeen she had taught herself a technique called 'directed dreaming': you started by learning to visualise your hands in dreams, and to do simple things like clasping them and touching your face, and gradually you developed the ability to move around consciously in your dreams, and eventually to fly wherever you wanted to go. It was like astral travelling, she said, only you didn't have to believe in silver cords or astral bodies or anything like that, you just practised the mental exercises whenever you were going to sleep until you could do them while you were actually dreaming. Soon she and I were making rapturous love in her dreams-in which she was always healed, moving with complete freedom – whereas I practised and practised and got nowhere at all.

With the dreaming, that is. Instead, I was using her dreams to script my sexual fantasies about the composite Pre-Raphaelite goddess I imagined as Alice-I had never been able to recall her as she had appeared to me that one magical night-meanwhile pretending that I'd learned to dream as she did. Not knowing what else to do, I modelled my letters on hers, which were never physically explicit, but tenderly, ecstatically, erotic. I dared not confess my abject failure at directed dreaming; I knew the words they used at school, and felt myself sinking into the coarse, fallen world of shame and guilt and bestial obscenities on lavatory walls, whilst Alice soared higher and higher into the golden light of heaven, in pure, innocent, orgasmic bliss.

Which she believed we shared. The thought of losing her trust was unbearable, yet I knew I no longer deserved it. Until then, my letters had flowed as effortlessly as speech: whenever I felt I hadn't said what I really meant, I'd just keep on writing until I had. Now I began to labour over them, re-reading anxiously, tearing up whole pages as I had never done before, my mind more and more frequently as blank as the sheet in front of me. And all too soon, she noticed.

I feel there's something wrong, your letters aren't as long as they used to be, and they seem-I don't know-a bit stilted?-anyway something's changed in the feeling of them. Please tell me. I'd hate it if you felt there was anything you couldn't say to me-even that you'd fallen out of love with me-I do mean that, truly. Trust me. I'll always adore you with my whole heart.

Your invisible lover,

Alice

I agonised over and destroyed one reply after another as the days slipped remorselessly by, and there was nothing left to do but tell the truth, at least as much of it as I could bear to confess. So I told her the dreams I'd been describing were really daydreams, though they still said how much I loved and adored her-I just hadn't been able to do the dreaming, hadn't dared tell her because I thought she'd think I didn't love her as much as she loved me, whereas I loved her truly, madly, desperately. And that I was unhappy because I really, really needed to be with her, couldn't go on living so far from her, and so-assuming she didn't decide to break it off right now, which I knew I deserved-if she did still love me would she please, please say that we could be together one day, I didn't care how long I had to wait. And so on, for several more scrawled, incoherent pages which I posted in utter despair, and dragged myself home in the spirit of a prisoner on his way to the condemned cell.

Over the next fortnight I learned the meaning of anguish. My face was numb and stiff with misery; I could scarcely speak. My appetite had vanished, my tongue sat in my mouth like some bloated alien substance, and yet the black gnawing hole in my stomach made me feel continuously sick. My mother pleaded with me to tell her what was wrong. My class teacher phoned my parents; the family doctor was summoned; I fended them all off with the adolescent's listless nothing', whilst wondering how I could find out how many aspirins you needed to swallow to die a painless death, and whether inhaling bottled gas would knock you out and kill you before the smell of it made you vomit. Alice's letters continued to arrive, even after she had answered the last of mine but one, wondering anxiously, tenderly, if I was sick or unhappy, telling me that she would always love me no matter what happened. Unable to write, I re-read all of her letters from the beginning several times over, waiting for the end.

When the letter finally arrived it took me an hour to summon the courage to open it.

Dearest Gerard,

I'm so, so sorry, I've been selfish and insensitive, too wrapped up in my own happiness-the happiness you give me-I should have realised. You're so brave to have told me, I would have done exactly the same if it had been the other way round. Can you ever forgive me?

And I haven't been completely honest, either, because I haven't always been asleep. When I've imagined making love with you, I mean. I was afraid you'd be shocked. I'm such a coward, I should have trusted you the way you've trusted me.

But now at least we know that neither of us needs to be shocked or embarrassed about wanting to make love. I really did mean what I said before, that nothing between us could ever be wrong, and to prove it to you… every day from now on, at half-past one, I'm going to lie down and close my eyes and imagine myself into my dream-body, and make love with you. And if you were to do the same, at ten o'clock at night, in your bed, then you can tell me exactly how you'd like to make love with me, on a special day, say in four weeks' time, so I can write back to you, and then we'll both know, on that day, that everything we've said is really happening.

And then… well how much can distance really matter, when I'll be as close to you as your dreams, your heartbeat?

Your invisible (but very passionate) lover

Alice

And so we became, in our strange and solitary way, lovers. She taught me not to be ashamed of what we were doing together-as she always insisted we were-but I lived in terror of my mother steaming open one of her letters until I discovered that for a few dollars a year I could have my own post office box with my own key. Gradually, subtly, tenderly, Alice taught me about her body-the body I had never seen-what she liked, what she loved, what she adored. Yet sometimes, afterwards, as I lay awake, staring at the side of Mr Drukowicz's shed, she seemed further away than ever. And no matter how eloquently I pleaded, she remained adamant that until she was healed-at least she had begun to say until'-we could not meet. I couldn't accept, or even understand, but I did come to see that my entreaties were only distressing her. I gave up pleading and kept my plan to myself. As soon as I had saved enough for my fare, I would be on the plane for England; I would search the length and breadth of Sussex until I found her. In my darkest imaginings, I would see myself being turned away with a stern 'Miss Jessell does not wish to see you.' But I went on saving every cent I could muster towards my airfare, and praying that I would not die without having seen Alice Jessell face to face.

TOWARDS THE END OF MY THIRD YEAR AT MAWSON UNIVERsity College, I set about applying for a passport. I was still living at home with my mother, banking the extra money I earned from shelving books in the college library, along with every cent I could save from my library studies scholarship, but still over a thousand dollars short of the sum that would take me to England and Alice.

For almost seven years now, my mother and I had maintained the pretence that Alice's letters were as invisible as Alice herself. At first, whenever I got home from school to find a letter waiting on the desk in my bedroom I used to examine the envelope closely for signs of tampering. (I had read about steaming open letters, though I'd never seen it done.) But I never found any. I knew that I was causing my mother pain, and if she had once broken her silence over Staplefield, I would have felt much worse about doing to her what she had previously done to me. Her 'nerves' had grown steadily worse, even before my father's sudden death. She hated being left alone after dark. Even now, if I got home more than half an hour late from my evening shift at the library, I would find her haunting the telephone table, wondering when to start ringing the hospitals.

Without Alice's letters, life at home would have been intolerable, but without Alice I wouldn't have been living there. Or in Mawson. My grades had been high enough to get me a place in one of the big eastern universities, but-apart from confronting my mother's pathological fears on my behalf-that would have made saving for England impossible. Whereas the Grace Levenson Memorial Library Studies Bursary paid all my fees and a living allowance, and would, I hoped, get me a job in England in just over a year's time.

And it pleased Alice to know that I hadn't abandoned my mother. Soon after we began writing, Alice and I had vowed that no matter what happened, we would never betray each other's secrets, or let anyone else read our letters: apart from the postman, no one outside our house even knew that Alice existed. She now had photographs of my parents, our house and its surroundings, and even, more recently, of me, to illustrate the day-to-day chronicle of my life in all its sameness and tedium; though Alice frequently assured me that nothing about me, however trivial, could possibly be boring to her. But she was troubled by the estrangement between my mother and me, and too perceptive not to see that she herself was partly the cause of it. At the same time, she understood my fear that if I broke the silence on my side, my mother would keep pushing and pushing until she had forced me into another confrontation. 'I know it's hard,' Alice had written recently, 'but you must cherish her, Gerard, you won't know how precious she is until she's gone. I only wish she could understand that I'm no threat: the last thing I want is to take you away from her.'

Alice was entirely sincere in this, because she still clung to her conviction that, short of a miraculous healing, we must never meet. But I had other plans.

UNTIL I ASSEMBLED MY PASSPORT APPLICATION, I HAD never seen a full copy of my own birth certificate. The short version I had used until then had told me nothing about my mother except that her maiden name had been Hatherley. Now I discovered that Phyllis May Hatherley had been born on 13 April 1929, in Portman Square, Marylebone, London Wl. Father George Rupert Hatherley, occupation Gentleman; mother Muriel Celia Hatherley, nee Wilson.

It ought not to have come as a shock. She had never actually said-at least I could not recall her ever saying-that she had been born at Staplefield, which after years of fruitless searching of atlases and reference books, I thought I might have found. Collins' Road Atlas of Britain showed a tiny village-the only Staplefield in the index-on the southern fringe of St Leonard's Forest in West Sussex. Just a minute black circle on a yellow byroad called the B2114, but it looked and felt right, though by no stretch of the imagination could anyone have expected to see ships at Portsmouth, fifty miles away to the south-west. Alice thought it would be quite common for a big country house to have the same name as the nearby village. Yet I still hadn't asked my mother about it-or anything else in her life before Mawson. Why had I always believed that her own parents had died when she was very young? Had she actually told me that, or had I simply imagined it? Why, above all, had I accepted her silence for so long? Didn't I have a right to my own history?

That evening, in our sitting room after dinner, I handed her the certificate. She took one look, and thrust it back at me.

'Why did you get this?' Her voice was ominously taut.

'I'm applying for a passport.'

'Why?'

'Because I'm going to England. As soon as I can afford to.'

My mother's attention was apparently fixed upon the unlit gas heater in our old fireplace. I could not see her face clearly because of the standard lamp between our armchairs, but its light fell upon her clasped hands, suddenly reminding me of old Mrs Noonan's, fingers clamped around swollen knuckles, blotched purple and livid white, the nails suffused with blood.

'You mean to stay,' she said at last.

'I don't know yet, Mother. If I did, I'd want you to come and live there too.'

'I can't afford it.'

'I could help.'

'I wouldn't let you. Anyway, I couldn't stand the winters.'

'But you hate the heat, Mother.'

'The cold would be worse.'

She was speaking mechanically, as if hardly aware of what she was saying.

'Mother, I didn't show you that to upset you. But it's time we talked-again. About your family. Because it's mine, too.'

The silence dragged out until I could bear it no longer.

'Mother did you hear what I-'

'I heard you.'

'Then tell me-' I broke off, not knowing what to ask. 'I-look, I still remember everything you used to tell me, when I was-before I-everything about Staplefield, and your grandmother, and I want to know-why you stopped talking about it, why I don't know anything-' I heard my voice beginning to quaver.

'There's nothing to tell,' she said after another long pause.

'But there must be. Your own parents. What happened to them?'

'They both died before-when I was a few months old. I don't remember anything about them.'

Her hands had dropped out of sight, below the arm of her chair.

'So-so did you live with your grandmother-Viola-was she your father's, or your mother's-'

'My father's. I told you everything I could remember, when you were a small boy.'

'But why did you stop after I-was it her picture I saw that day?'

'I don't remember any picture.'

Her voice sounded flatter and more disembodied with each reply.

'You must remember, Mother. You were so furious. The picture you caught me with, that afternoon in your bedroom-'

'You were always poking about in my bedroom, Gerard. You can't expect me to remember every single time I caught you in there.'

'But-but-' I could not quite believe this was happening. 'After that day you never mentioned Staplefield again-'

'All I remember, Gerard, is that as you grew older you stopped asking. And a good thing too. We can't live in the past.'

'No, but why won't you talk about it?'

'Because it's gone,' she snapped. 'There was-there was a fire. After we left. During the war. The house burned to the ground.'

'You never told me that!'

'No… I didn't want to disappoint you. That's-that's why I stopped talking about it.'

'Well I wish you had told me, Mother. All these years I've been hoping, hoping to…' I couldn't go on.

'Gerard, you didn't think it was ours?'

'No, of course not. I just wanted to see it.'

But of course I had thought of Staplefield as mine, without ever quite admitting it to myself. The long-lost heir, stranded in Mawson, waiting for the family solicitors to call him home. Ridiculous, absurd. My eyes were stinging.

'I'm sorry, Gerard. It was very wrong of me. I wish I'd never mentioned the place.'

'No, Mother. I wish you hadn't stopped. Why did you leave? What caused the fire?'

'It was-a bomb. We-I was away at school. In Devon. Away from the bombing.'

For a moment she had seemed genuinely contrite. Now she sounded evasive.

'And Viola?'

'She looked after me. Until she died. Just after the war. Then I had to go out to work.'

'But it was a big house, you had servants. Wasn't it insured? Didn't Viola leave you anything?'

Another long pause.

'It all went in death duties. There was just enough left to pay for my typing course. She did everything she could for me. That's all.'

'Mother it is not all and you know it. What about "Seraphina"?'

'I don't know what you're talking about.'

'Viola's story. In the drawer with the photograph.'

'I don't remember any story.'

I opened my mouth to object, and realised I couldn't push it any further.

'Why don't you want to talk about your, past?'

'For the same reason you never talk about your-friend, I suppose. It's no one else's business. Not even yours.'

For the first time in seven years, my mother had acknowledged Alice's existence.

'No, it's not the same. Alice isn't-she's nothing to do with you-'

'She's taken you away from me.'

'That's not fair! Anyway, I'm almost twenty-one, people leave home and get married-'

'So you're getting married? Well thank you for mentioning it-'

'I didn't say that!'

'Well are you or aren't you?'

'I don't know yet!'

We were both almost shouting.

'I don't want to talk about her, Mother,' I said more quietly.

'But you're going to see her.'

'I-I just don't want to talk about her.'

'Gerard,' she said heavily, after a long silence, 'I know you think I'm jealous. A jealous mother who won't let go. Nothing I say will make any difference. Just remember: I tried to keep you safe.'

'Safe from what, Mother?'

But all she said was, 'I'm going to bed now.'

'Tell me one thing, then,' I said, 'I won't ask you any more. Where exactly was Staplefield? The house, I mean. Was it in Staplefield village?'

Her chair creaked. She stood up and moved stiffly towards the door. I thought she would leave without speaking, but in the doorway she turned, light flashing from the lenses of her spectacles.

'Going to look for Staplefield would be a complete waste of money. There's nothing left. Nothing.'

She flung the last word over her shoulder. It hung in the air like the smell of charred paper as her footsteps receded along the hall.

I HAD ALWAYS IMAGINED THE DEAD HEART AS A FEATUREless, Saharan expanse of sand. From thirty-five thousand feet, I watched the patterns unrolling beneath the wing, fantastic whorls and cross-hatchings and striations, ochreous yellows and earth-browns and purples and deep rust-reds, until the hostess asked me if I would mind closing my blind so the other passengers could watch the movie. I did mind, never having been in a plane before, but I closed it anyway and sat holding my unopened book.

Twenty-two hours to Heathrow. I didn't seriously believe-did I?-that after eight years of undying adoration Alice would have me turned away at the door? Her letters were as tenderly passionate as ever. I had written to tell her I would be at the Stanhope Hotel, Sussex Gardens, London W2, which sounded leafy and grand, despite being called 'budget' in the brochure. Admittedly it was January, so there might not be many leaves, but there was sure to be a letter waiting when I arrived. From the hotel I would ring Penfriends International, who were bound to be in the phone book, though I still had only their box number. Maybe I should have written ahead to Juliet Summers, but I'd been over and over that. Much better to plead my case in person.

Since I had stopped pleading with Alice to change her mind, neither of us had mentioned the possibility of our meeting. Her view of my coming to live in England was seemingly unchanged: she would love to feel that I was so much closer, but only if I could persuade my mother to join me. Alice and I were pretending to believe that, while it would be wonderful to be in the same country at last, the purpose of my trip was to look around for places where my mother might be persuaded to settle. And to see Staplefield, assuming my mother really had invented the fire. But how could Alice possibly, doubt that I'd come looking for her? And since she hadn't made me promise not to, she must-mustn't she?-be waiting for me to find her.

The businessman in the seat next to me had put away his papers and fallen asleep. I knew already that I wasn't afraid of flying. So why did I feel so numbly apprehensive, as if something cold and leaden had lodged in the pit of my stomach and refused to dissolve, not just since take-off but for days beforehand?

Perhaps I was more anxious about my mother than I was willing to admit. She had been behaving as if I had a terminal illness rather than a three-week excursion fare to London. Not to mention a job as an assistant librarian at Mawson University College, starting in February. I couldn't imagine how I would tear myself away from Alice, but three weeks was all I could afford; I would have to come back to save more money and apply for permanent residence. If my mother couldn't bear the thought of life without me, she would just have to overcome her pathological fear of return, or travel, or whatever it was. It didn't matter how often I repeated that I was a thousand times more likely to die in a car than a plane crash; she treated all of my attempts at reassurance as irrelevant interruptions. I noticed that she had grown even more intolerant of noise; she could not bear the radio on, and reacted to the ringing of the phone as if it were a fire alarm. She seemed to be listening to-or for-sounds inaudible to anyone else.

Since the night, just over a year ago, when she told me Staplefield had burnt down, she had not once referred to Alice. Our day-to-day life had gone on as before, as if the no-go areas did not exist. I had learned to cook in spite of her protests, though she still would not let me near the washing-machine or the iron, or accept any money for board. But the balance between us had altered. Now it felt as if she was the one on the defensive. I won't mention your friend, again, her silence seemed to say, so don't ask me any more about my past.

I was shocked by my reaction to the loss of Staplefield. My rational self stood helplessly by while I grieved for the place as if I had watched it burn with everything I loved inside it. Knowing that these feelings were utterly illogical didn't seem to help in the slightest. Until one night, in the middle of a letter to Alice, it struck me that in all my happily-ever-after daydreams, we simply took over Alice's room, whereupon it was magically incorporated into Staplefield, to which I was of course the rightful heir. And now we couldn't live there, because it had burnt to the ground. Even after this disturbing recognition-which I did not mention to Alice-I was troubled by a kind of waking nightmare in which I stood alone at her window looking out at a charred, blackened landscape, feeling that I was somehow responsible for the devastation.

Yet at the same time-and this made my distress seem even more irrational-I still suspected my mother of inventing the fire on the spot, to block any further approach to Staplefield, for reasons I couldn't begin to fathom. Alice, for all her reluctance to join in any criticism of my mother, plainly thought I was right. 'Perhaps', she had written,

there was some sort of family quarrel, after your great-grandmother died, and your mother was disinherited-of course she couldn't possibly have done anything to deserve that. But I know how it feels, having to let go of everything you love. Perhaps it's easier for your mother to say the house went up in smoke than to admit that other people are living in it. And surely she'd have said something about the fire, when you were little, so as not to get your hopes up? I mean, of living there one day. Perhaps when you were small she still hoped Staplefield might come back to you, and then something happened, something final that meant it could never be hers, or yours, and that's why she stopped talking to you.

Actually that reminds me of something.

Later: I've just been reading through your letters, the very first ones you ever wrote me, and I just found this: 'Mother said we can't go and live there because it was sold a long time ago and we don't have enough money to buy it back.' Perhaps she was still hoping, when she said that, that one day you might be able to afford it. Before whatever happened that made her abandon hope completely. What do you think?

I thought it made perfect sense. It also reminded me of the photograph I had found in my mother's bedroom. I'd always assumed that she had stopped talking about Staplefield to punish me. Perhaps the two things were unrelated: maybe the bad news just happened to arrive at about the same time. Maybe… but that Medusa-like fury… No, there had to be a connection. Perhaps catching me with the photograph had caused my mother to make some enquiry about Staplefield, something that brought on the bad news, whatever the news might have been? No point asking her. 'Photograph, what photograph?' More to the point: whose photograph? Not Viola's, surely: my mother had only ever spoken of Viola with affection. Wouldn't Viola's picture have been displayed on our mantelpiece, at least when we were still talking freely of Staplefield?

And I still hadn't said anything more to my mother about finding 'Seraphina', so I still didn't even know, for certain, that 'V.H.' was my great-grandmother. I had opened the drawer one more time and found it empty. Then as I learned more about the library, I realised I could order The Chameleon on inter-library loan, photocopy the story, present it to my mother as if I had no idea who 'V.H.' might be, and see how she reacted. Only one problem: there wasn't a copy of The Chameleon to be found anywhere in the southern hemisphere. From the British Library Catalogue I learned that it had run for just four numbers, from March to December of 1898. The only way to see them was to secure a reader's ticket; I had my letter of introduction in my pocket.

Seraphina's resemblance to Alice still sometimes troubled me. Rationally speaking, I knew there was nothing in the least uncanny about it. Of course Viola would have been to exhibitions of Pre-Raphaelite painting. She might perfectly well have seen the Lady of Shalott herself when the picture was first exhibited at the Royal Academy. Only Seraphina hadn't reminded me of the Lady, or any of the faces I'd borrowed from Burne-Jones, Millais, Waterhouse and company, but of Alice as I'd seen her in the dream. The memory had faded as quickly as it had come, but I had never quite shaken off a superstitious fancy that in opening the drawer for a second time I had accepted the terms of an inheritance, with no idea of what that might entail.

The plane shuddered and rattled like a bus crossing a stretch of gravel road. Twenty-one and a half hours to go. The dull weight of subdued, half-anaesthetised anxiety had not diminished. Maybe reading would dislodge it. I picked up Henry James, The Turn of the Screw and Other Tales.

'WHERE, MY PET, IS MISS JESSEL?' THE PHRASE REPEATED itself over and over, through the cramped, interminable night aboard QF 9. The engines played endless rhythmic variations on the words: dum dadadda dada, dum dadada dum, dum dadadadadada. They didn't care that Alice spelled her surname with two Ts. Every so often they would lift the tempo to Miss Jessel Miss Jessel Miss Jessel Miss Jessel, just to make sure I was still awake enough to hallucinate. Where, my pet, is Miss Jessel? Waiting in Alice's room of course. I knew I would never get the name out of my head. I had once looked it up in the Mawson phone book. Not a single Jessell, whichever way you spelt it. Alice would take one look at me and know that something was appallingly, irrevocably wrong. I wouldn't be able to look at her without thinking of Miss Jessel. Miss Jessel with her dead white face and long black dress. Like the man in the churchyard, tramping over my mother's grave, and were you aware sir, that your late mother was in a highly disturbed state, while out in the garage the trains still ran on time, round and round and round Miss Jessel and where Miss Jessel is my pet, waking with a thump to the runway lights of Heathrow and rain streaming over the wing.

I hadn't realised that it would still be dark when the Airbus deposited me outside Paddington station. Or that the Stanhope-when they eventually agreed to let me in-would be a claustrophobic warren, smelling of wet animal hair, stale fry-ups, and mould. The stairs creaked at every tread, and the only window in my room, or rather cell on the second floor, opened into a so called lightwell and a view of blackened walls and rusting fire escapes.

And no letter from Alice, though I had sent her the address a fortnight before I left. Struggling to shake off the depression which seemed to be gathering around me like thick black mist, I stumbled back down the stairs to the payphone in the foyer.

From Directory Enquiries I learned that Penfriends International had an unlisted number. There were dozens of entries for Summers, J., in the phone book, but none of them gave the Mount Pleasant box number as their address. And when it finally occurred to me to phone Mount Pleasant post office, they would only confirm that Penfriends International were indeed at Box 294. All other details were strictly confidential sir, I'm sorry there's nothing more I can tell you, more than my job's worth, sorry sir but there it is, can't help you any more.

I dragged myself back up the creaking staircase, lay down on the bed, and slipped head-first into a pit of darkness.

IT WAS ALL TRUE, EVERYTHING MY MOTHER HAD SAID, THERE really were mountains of black plastic bags spewing garbage on to the pavement wherever you went. Ragged beggars lined the underpasses, wrapped in sodden cardboard, lying in pools of unspeakable filth. I couldn't walk two blocks through the rain and sleet without getting lost, or stop to wrestle with my London A-Z without being jostled into the gutter by seething crowds. Half frozen but rabidly adhesive dogshit lurked beneath the slush. The chaffinches had all mutated into scrofulous pigeons.

Each morning until the postman arrived, I hovered in the Stanhopes reeking foyer, waiting for a letter which never came. Then I would set off for the British Museum in grey half-light, to haunt the Reading Room until closing time, searching for some trace of Alice. I knew that I ought to be overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the Museum: the immense stone columns, the rainswept forecourt seething with tourists, the Babel of unknown languages rising from the front steps, the Reading Room itself, into which the whole Mawson College Library building would have fitted quite comfortably. I would stare up into the blue and gold dome above the tiered galleries and try to feel something, anything, but it was like looking at the sun through a thick pall of smoke. I would feel eyes following me up and down the aisles; several times I felt certain I had caught people staring at me with horror, as if they could actually see the fog of black depression that enveloped me.

Some of my fellow readers were in no better shape: the little old woman in the filthy grey raincoat who sat all day in row L, with half a dozen tattered shopping bags clustered at her feet, muttering at the partition in front of her; or the wild-eyed, white-haired man at the far end of row C, who shielded his book with both arms when anybody approached him. And once a tall, emaciated old lady, who smelt strongly of mothballs and wore a black veil so impenetrable you could not see even the outline of a face beneath, came and sat next to me for two hours while I worked my way through a pile of directories. She had The Times open in front of her, but I felt she was watching me all the time.

On the third day I braved the slush down Kingsway to Catherine House, where the records of births and marriages were kept. A gloomy concrete bunker, dank and cold, smelling of greasy folios and sodden clothing. The quarterly registers – huge steel-reinforced volumes, red for births and green for marriages (deaths were kept on the other side of Kingsway)-were housed in rows of battered metal shelves. Grim-faced searchers swarmed over every row, fighting for position, slamming the massive volumes on and off the shelves. Couples fought and shouted in the aisles; the noise was deafening. I hovered politely beside the 1960s for a few minutes before trying to insinuate myself into the scrum. Someone rammed the metal corner of a register into my kidneys; an elbow jabbed my ribs; an anonymous hand snatched 'J-L Jan.-Mar. 1964' from over my shoulder and carried it off. Finding Alice's birth certificate, I realised, would contribute absolutely nothing to my search for her. Cowed, shivering, I surrendered without a fight.

In the relative tranquillity of the Reading Room, I scoured directories for lists of nursing homes in Sussex and poured pound after pound's worth of coins into payphones: no Alice Jessell anywhere. Alice didn't want to be found.

On the fifth day I woke with a thick head and a rasping throat, but rather than lie staring into the darkness of the lightwell I dragged myself back to the Museum.

In a Sussex directory for the 1930s, I looked up the entry for Staplefield. There was a Staplefield House listed, but the owner was a Colonel Reginald Bassington. No Viola, or any Hatherley was listed as a resident, there or in any of the neighbouring villages or towns. There was no Viola Hatherley in the main catalogue either. I ordered the four numbers of The Chameleon, thinking as I did so how horribly prophetic 'Seraphina' had turned out to be.

But of the four numbers only the fourth and last was delivered: the slips for the other three came back marked 'Destroyed by bombing during the war'. Without much hope or even interest I glanced through the table of contents. The Chameleon. Volume I, Number 4, December 1898. Essay by Ernest Rhys. Story by Amy Levy. Poems by Herbert Home and Selwyn Image-and 'The Gift of Flight: A Tale', by V.H.

The Gift of Flight

THE READING ROOM OF THE BRITISH Museum is not, I think, the first place in which most of us would seek refuge from a consuming grief, especially not in winter, when fog creeps into the great dome and hangs like a damp halo about the electric lamps. Nor are ones fellow readers always the most desirable company, some being less than fastidious in matters of dress and personal cleanliness, whilst others, seemingly on the verge of madness, conduct whispered conversations with phantoms, or crouch motionless for an entire afternoon, glaring at the same unturned page. Others again lie sprawled in attitudes of abandoned despair or exhaustion, snoring away the hours with their heads pillowed upon priceless volumes until the attendants come to turn them out. There are of course many industrious souls deep in concentration or copying busily, so that the dome seems to echo, at times, to the faint sound of a hundred nibs scratching in unison, but to a troubled mind that sound can too easily suggest the fingernails of prisoners clawing upon stone.

So, at least, it seemed to Julia Lockhart, and yet she was drawn back there by the conviction that the library contained one particular book which would speak directly to her sorrow. It would be like finding a new friend, one whose perceptions were so subtly and delicately attuned to hers as to see further into her heart than she herself was capable of doing. But since she had no idea what kind of book, or by whom, she spent a great deal of her time idly turning the pages of the catalogue, or gazing sightlessly into the black leather surface of her desk, or wandering the circumference of the labyrinth-the image that came most frequently to her mind, given the catacombs filled with shelf upon shelf of books that she imagined stretching away into darkness beneath the floor.

It had been many months since she and Frederick Liddell had parted, and yet the pall of grief had in no way diminished; instead, it had darkened into something quite beyond her experience. A thick veil seemed to have fallen between her and the world; she felt estranged, not only from friends and family, but from herself. She could not work, for all power of concentration had left her. Her husband kept his accustomed round between his chambers, his club, and his chair by the fireside, tranquilly unaware that anything was wrong; her daughter Florence was away at school in Berne; and the chatter of friends, in which Julia had once joined so enthusiastically, now seemed like die gibbering of dead souls in limbo. Yet to all outward appearances she had merely done what so many women yoked to indifferent husbands had done before her. She numbered amongst her own acquaintance women who moved cheerfully and lightly from one lover to the next, and knew of cases in which the children of such unions were accepted by the said indifferent husbands without apparent protest. The code seemed to be that so long as appearances were more or less maintained, women as well as men could do as they pleased. Whereas to Julia the taking of a lover had seemed an altogether momentous step. She had yearned for an intimacy to which she could bring her whole heart, which would release something trapped within her, free a door in her imagination which seemed to have swollen and stuck fast; but until the day she met Frederick Liddell she had come to believe she would die without ever having found it.

Marriage to Ernest Lockhart had been the great disappointment of Julia's life. Yet she had nothing to say against him, beyond an entire absence of passion, and even there, he had not deceived her; she had deceived herself. At twenty, she had allowed herself to be overborne by the romance of marrying a man sixteen years her senior, so assured and cultivated beside, say, young Harry Fletcher who had blushed and stammered every time he spoke to her but who, as she realised far too late, had plainly adored her. Her parents had not forced her; on the contrary, she could still recall her father asking her very earnestly if she was quite sure, and hear herself saying blithely yes, airily convinced that Ernest Lockhart's reserve concealed an answering force of passion. And then to discover her husband so… well, so inept and lifeless, yet so wedded to the shows and forms of marriage, and so incapable of comprehending her unhappiness. Had it not been for her daughter, born within a year of the wedding, she would have left him; as it was, she had worked at her writing and entertained her friends, unable in the end to hate her husband for being what he was, and feeling, as her thirtieth birthday receded, only a dull subterranean anger at the inexorable waste of life.

And then, on a warm spring afternoon at the house of a distinguished man of letters, she had been introduced to Frederick Liddell, whose latest volume of poems she had read only the week before, and very soon found herself deep in conversation with him in a quiet comer of the distinguished mans garden, where they sat upon a bench in the shade of an oak and talked until she had lost all consciousness of time. He was not much over thirty, and looked even younger, for his complexion was as fair and soft as a woman's, and his dark eyes capable, as it seemed to Julia, of a quite feminine subtlety. Even his wavy brown hair seemed expressive in its unruly abundance, brushed across a broad, high forehead, the face narrowing markedly to a strong, rounded chin. His enthusiasms chased one another across his features; in repose, his most characteristic expression was one of gentle melancholy, a mild sadness which Julia found quite irresistible, all the more so because Frederick seemed utterly devoid of guile. She was used to fending off the attentions of practised seducers such as her unhappy friend Irene's husband Hector, with whom, it was said, no woman could safely be left alone for five minutes, but whose oily countenance invariably reminded Julia of Mr Chadband. But she was quite unused to being listened to with such responsive absorption. By the time she discovered that he had read and admired the one tale of hers that had so far been published, Julia felt certain she had made a friend for life.

They spoke a great deal that afternoon of religion, or rather of the impossibility of either believing in any of its prescribed forms, or living without some aspiration beyond the material, without coming to any definite conclusion save that their feelings seemed to be in entire agreement. In poetry they were divided by Julia's preference for Keats against his for Shelley, but this only opened the happy prospect of their reading their favourite passages to one another on some future occasion. From there they progressed naturally to dreams, and Julia found herself telling Frederick of a dream she had had on perhaps half a dozen occasions. It usually began in soft summer twilight, in an open field, a gentle slope covered in long green grass. She would begin to run down the slope, taking longer and longer strides until she could feel her feet just brushing the tips of the grass and remember, with a great rush of joy, that she had been born with the gift of flight. Then she would extend her arms and soar above the fields, feeling utterly at home in the air until the awareness that she was dreaming began to press itself upon her. Always she would struggle to hold onto the dream; for one magical, exhilarating moment she would believe that she had woken and yet continued to fly, until the world dissolved beneath her and she was left alone and bereft in darkness, like the knight-at-arms waking upon the cold hill's side. This was something she had never disclosed to anyone, for fear that if she did not keep it secret, the dream would never come back to her. Yet she spoke of it quite spontaneously to Frederick, and when she had done so, saw that he was greatly moved.

SOME YEARS AGO, HE SAID, HE HAD FALLEN IN LOVE WITH a dancer named Lydia Lopez-not her real name, for she had been born and bred in London, but the only one he had ever known her by, just as he had been left only one memento of her, though he did not say what it was. He had gone every night to the theatre where she performed, and sometimes taken her to supper afterwards. Frederick did not describe Lydia very distinctly, other than to say that she was very small and slightly formed, so much so that she could easily have been taken for a child of twelve or thirteen.

One particularly elaborate scene-a favourite with the audience-called for her to be equipped with wings and to soar, suspended from a wire, high above the stage. Frederick had been in the front row on the night when the wire gave way and Lydia fell from the painted heavens; he could still, he said, shuddering at the memory, hear the dreadful thud of her body striking the boards. The curtain was instantly drawn; yet to everyone's amazement and relief, she came out half an hour later, looking a little dazed but apparently uninjured, and took a bow, drawing rapturous applause from the house. But the relief was premature; a few hours later she lapsed into unconsciousness, and she died two days later of a haemorrhage to the brain.

Before Lydia, Frederick confessed, he had fancied himself in love with a different woman every week, but he had never since been able to care for anyone as he had cared for her. 'I did not know how much she meant to me until she was gone/ he said, gazing into Julia's eyes with such open, unaffected feeling that her sympathy went out to him entirely; so much so that she found she had taken his hand in both of hers. She felt, if anything, strangely reassured by this disclosure; and he accepted her invitation to tea at her house in Hyde Park Gardens with such eagerness, and told her with such warmth how delighted he was to have met her, that she went home happier than she could remember being since she had first held her infant daughter in her arms.

Julia knew herself in love with Frederick from that first afternoon, but it was many weeks before she dared hope that her feeling might be returned, for when she saw him next in company she wondered if he were not exactly the same ardent, attentive listener with everyone of his acquaintance. Yet he accepted all of her suggestions for meeting, despite the demands upon his time-he had a small private income, supplemented by a great deal of reviewing-with such eagerness that her imagination would insist upon running far ahead of her. She dared not invite him too often to her house, for she could not bear the thought of their relations becoming the object of common gossip, and so they met in galleries and parks, and sometimes in the Reading Room, always maintaining the pretext that such-and-such would be an interesting thing to do as soon as they found the opportunity. There always seemed to be more to say than they had time for, and as the days lengthened he spoke less often of Lydia; but it was not until spring had passed into summer that she arrived, with a rapidly beating heart, at the entrance to a mansion block towering above a narrow Bloomsbury street, in response to his first invitation to tea.

HE HAD WARNED HER ABOUT THE STAIRS, APOLOGISING for his preference for living as high above the street as possible, but she was still surprised by how many flights there were, and though the day was cool and cloudy, she was quite dazzled by the light when he ushered her into his sitting room. There were tall casements on either side of narrow French windows, through which Julia glimpsed the iron railing of a small balcony. The room was not large; two armchairs and a sofa arranged upon a Persian carpet took up much of the floor, and there were bookshelves ranged along the other walls. Julia would have liked to look around, but Frederick immediately invited her to be seated; his manner was more formal than usual, and his constraint affected her, so that instead of the sofa she took the right-hand armchair, whereupon Frederick excused himself to make the tea, and left her alone in the room.

From this she deduced that she was, as she had hoped, to be the only guest, and sat willing herself to feel less agitated and more at ease. As her eyes adjusted to the brightness she became aware that she was not, after all, quite alone, for on a desk at the window nearest to her chair stood a framed photograph, a head-and-shoulders portrait of a young woman who could only be Lydia. She was both like and unlike the Lydia of Julia's imagination: at first glance the face appeared rounded and child-like, especially in the set of the lower lip and chin, but there was also a subdued sensuality which became more apparent the longer one looked into the dark eyes that gazed so directly back, the eyes of a woman fully aware of her power to charm-or mesmerise. "For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!" the words echoed suddenly in Julia's awareness, and left her wishing she had not recalled them.

She was still absorbed in contemplation of Lydia's portrait when Frederick returned with the tea-tray. But he did not seem to notice, and instead launched into an account of how he had that morning read and reviewed four three-decker novels without cutting a single page, delivered his copy, and sold all four in pristine condition in Fleet Street in time for lunch. Julia felt a certain pang at the thought of judgement being passed so lightly upon all those months or years of hard authorial labour, but reminded herself sternly that Frederick was obliged to earn most of his own living by his pen, and had not the luxury of Ernest Lockhart's twelve hundred a year, which prompted a pang of quite another sort. They started several other topics, but none of them seemed to catch fire; perhaps it was the effect of Lydia's cool, steady gaze, which Julia could neither dismiss entirely from her consciousness nor allude to directly; at any rate the constraint seemed to grow between them until she sat miserably wishing she had not come. The room, too, was very close; she could feel herself becoming flushed and overheated as her unhappiness increased, until she was obliged to ask Frederick to open a window. He sprang from his chair in a welter of apologies and threw open the French windows, letting in a welcome draught of air. Unable to bear the pressure of Lydia's regard an instant longer, Julia rose and went to join him in the doorway.

She had never been-at least she felt she had never been-so high above the ground. The balcony appeared to her no larger than a window-box, with a small semicircular floor of pressed metal, and two hooped black horizontal railings curving out into empty space. The higher of these was only a little above her own waist. Even standing in the doorway, she seemed to be looking straight down into the abyss. Julia had stood close to the edge of a precipice without feeling anything like the fear that gripped her now; the sheer, vertiginous chasm beneath her feet seemed to be drawing her irresistibly towards the brink; in another second she would surely pitch head-first over the rail and into the void. All of these impressions raced across her mind in the space of a single glimpse, during which she was also aware of Frederick turning towards her and opening his mouth as if to speak, but ridiculously slowly, so that he reminded her of some great bird ponderously opening its beak. With the same absurd slowness, she saw herself reaching for his arm to save herself from falling, suspended between terror and a strange impulse to laugh at Frederick's gathering her in such a leisurely fashion into his embrace that she seemed to have time to reacquaint herself with every nuance of his expression before feeling, at last, the pressure of his lips upon her own. The sensation of vertigo remained; perhaps they had indeed fallen, but it did not seem to matter, for she felt quite weightless, and might as easily have been floating up as down.

THAT EVENING SHE WALKED ALONE AROUND THE BANKS of the Serpentine and felt the world to be a blessed place. She knew, dimly, that the gulf between her present situation and the life she imagined herself living with Frederick might prove impassable, but she could not give him up now; perhaps her husband would bow gracefully to the inevitable; in the meantime she felt perfectly content in the warmth of the suns diminishing rays and the certainty that Frederick loved her, and would tell her so again before tomorrows sun had set. But with the next morning's post came a note which said only: "Dear Mrs Lockhart, I very much regret that I shall be unable to keep our appt this afternoon; I can only plead the most pressing and unexpected business, and pray that you will accept my most abject apologies. Believe me, yours very sincerely, Frederick Liddell."

Julia had always appreciated his tact and discretion, but the notes formal brevity, and worse, the absence of any indication as to when, or even if, she might expect to hear from him again, chilled her to the bone. In vain she struggled to reassure herself with the thought that Frederick had, after all, to earn his living as best he could; for if such demands had never before prevented him from seeing her, how could they possibly have done so now? The rest of the day crawled by beneath an ever-darkening cloud of apprehension and despair. After a sleepless night of torment, Julia could bear no more; as soon as her husband had departed for his chambers she sent Frederick an unsigned note saying she would call at his rooms at three o'clock.

He was waiting at the street door when her cab arrived. One glance at his face confirmed her worst fears. In silence they trudged up flight after flight of stairs to the room that had witnessed such extremities of rapture. As the memory flooded back to her, Julia turned towards Frederick as if praying to be woken from a nightmare. To her horror, he actually recoiled before checking himself with a forced, mechanical courtesy that set the final seal upon her humiliation. Bright sunshine streamed mockingly through the tall casements; the French windows were closed.

"Frederick; tell me what has happened."

Her lips were so numb with misery that she could barely utter the words.

"I fear-I find I am hot free," he stammered, "that is to say… that my affections are after all engaged… I had hoped to overcome… that it would not… but I find I cannot…" He trailed off hopelessly.

"Do you mean-that there is someone else?"

"Yes." His eyes looked like the eyes of a dead man.

"Then why did you not tell me so before?"

"I did. But I had hoped…"

She did not understand until she realised that he was gesturing towards the portrait by the window. For a long moment Julia stood transfixed by Lydia's cool, implacable gaze, unwilling to comprehend what she had just heard.

"She is dead, Frederick. Whereas I…" But she could not go on.

"To the world, yes, but alas, not to me."

"And you feel you have betrayed her," said Julia bleakly.

"Yes," said Frederick. "I am most dreadfully sorry…"

Her tears would no longer be denied; she went blindly from the room and left him to his self-recrimination.

AS THE MONTHS PASSED, JULIA FELT HERSELF MORE AND more irretrievably exiled from the life she had formerly led. The longing to speak of her sorrow remained as acute as ever, but there was no one, not even her closest friend Marianne, upon whose discretion she could absolutely rely. Perhaps it Was pride that made the idea of being talked about so intolerable to her; more particularly, the idea that anyone should know that her life had been laid waste by a rejection that, to some women of her acquaintance, might have meant little more than a loss at croquet. Julia was herself bewildered by the extent of the desolation that had befallen her; it was like wandering through the abandoned ruins of a once-thriving city. "Vet so far as she could tell, most of her friends were scarcely aware of the change in her. It was very strange to look in the mirror and see the same face and form that Frederick had once called beautiful, thinner and paler, but otherwise unaltered.

Her dream of flight had not returned; instead she had been several times visited by a nightmare of finding herself high up on a shattered wall of stone, like the ruin of some great abbey whose roof had long since collapsed. Far below, mounds of fallen brickwork and rubble lay heaped upon the outlines of foundations and the remnants of other walls, with grass and weeds growing over them. At first the top of the wall on which she knelt would be relatively broad, though jagged, but in seeking a safe way to descend she would find the way becoming narrower and more precarious, the stone crumbling beneath her hands until she saw that she had crawled to the very end of a broken arch where she could only cling to a rotten tongue of stone, petrified by fear of plummeting down amidst great shards and fragments of masonry, feeling the very fabric of, the world dissolve within her grasp.

Doubtless if she had been able to speak openly to anyone, she would not have come to haunt the Reading Room, or to believe that somewhere in the labyrinth was hidden that one book, whatever it might be: not a work of philosophy or theology, for Julia had had little taste for abstract thought even in happier days, and could now make no more sense of philosophical discourse than she could of Sanskrit. She imagined a voice speaking plainly and directly out of the wilderness into which she had stumbled; for someone must have crossed it before her, and found exactly the wisdom she so painfully lacked.

To be entirely candid with herself, she was also drawn to the Reading Room by the hope of seeing Frederick. But the hope had so far proven vain. Recently, while consulting the catalogue, she had overheard an exchange between two men, evidently acquaintances of Frederick's, the one remarking that Liddell had become a complete recluse these days, to which his companion replied that poor old Freddy must be immersed in the composition of some great work. They had laughed at this, in a way that Julia found very troubling, so that she had returned to her place and sat for an indefinite time gazing sightlessly at the volume before her.

The truth was that she still loved him, though she wished she did not. She had tried to hate him and failed; she could not even hate Lydia, for how could she blame a dead woman for what had happened? Indeed she felt herself increasingly surrounded by people who preferred the company of the deceased to that of the living. Her husband, as he had grown older, had become ever more fascinated by his departed forebears; then there was poor Aunt Helen who had spent the greater part of her life going from one'séance to the next, constantly receiving messages from her adored fiancé Lionel who had been lost to fever in the Crimea nearly half a century before. Julia had lately accompanied her aunt to a few of these gatherings, and had been depressed by the mingled accents of credulity and fraud, not to mention the thought of all those others thronging the great city in pursuit of phantoms. And now there was Frederick, lost to the memory of Lydia; and Julia herself was scarcely in a better case. She had often selfishly wished they had fallen from the balcony that afternoon; she would have died in bliss instead of being condemned to linger in a world where, as it seemed to her, so many of the living moved like ghosts among the seekers of the dead.

SUCH WERE HER THOUGHTS ON A SOMBRE AFTERNOON late in February, when the fog hovering in the dome seemed thicker than usual. Julia was on the verge of packing up to leave when a book was delivered to her place; she did not see by whom. It was not, however, the edition of Clare's poems for which she had earlier lodged an application, but a plain octavo volume with black boards; so plain, in fact, that it bore neither a tide nor an authors name upon its spine. Puzzled, she opened it, to be confronted only by the heading, "Chapter One"; yet there was no sign of damage or missing pages. It appeared to be a novel; indeed a novel set in Bloomsbury, for it began with a description of a furious altercation between two cabmen in Great Russell Street. One of the men wore a dirty red kerchief, the other a white; as the dispute grew yet more heated, the two men descended from their respective boxes and fell to pushing one another about the pavement, and then to blows, whereupon both were forced to give way by "the approach of an immense woman, dressed entirely in black and bearing in her arms what appeared from its shape to be a child's coffin, incongruously wrapped in brown paper and tied with string"-but when Julia went to turn the page she found that it had not been cut. Curious to know how the narrative would proceed, she looked about for an attendant. At once a tall, nondescript man whom she could not recall seeing before approached; he had evidently observed her difficulty, for with a murmured "Pray allow me, madam" he took up the volume and disappeared through a side door.

Julia sat for some minutes waiting for him to return, but he did not, and her faint curiosity dwindled away to nothing. The pall of melancholy settled once more about her; she collected her belongings and left the Reading Room. Outside, the sky was dark and lowering it looked as if rain, or even snow, might begin to fall at any moment, so she hastened across the courtyard and requested the constable at the gate to secure her a cab. None were in sight as she stepped onto the pavement of Great Russell Street, but then she saw two appearing round the Montague Street corner. She heard the constable whistle; the cab at the rear swung out and attempted to pass the one in front; the vehicles seemed to touch, and the next moment the two cabmen were embroiled in a furious exchange of oaths. One leapt down from his box; the other followed; Julia thought she saw a flash of red at the latter's throat, but it was not until a vast woman, clad in voluminous layers of black, emerged from a doorway bearing a large, strangely shaped parcel in her arms and forced the struggling cabmen to part, one on each side of her, as she set out across the road, that the full import of what she was seeing struck Julia like a physical blow. In the same instant she heard the constable addressing her and, half turning, saw that a third cab had emerged from Museum Street and drawn up immediately behind her.

"Best get in, ma'am," said the constable. "I'll 'ave to see to that there embrocation."

Numbly, Julia obeyed. As her driver turned his horse, she had just time to see the two cabmen retreating towards their vehides at the approach of the constable, and the woman's immense back departing in the direction of Southampton Row.

TEN O'CLOCK THE NEXT MORNING FOUND HER ONCE again at the Reading Room, though she had never before arrived so soon after opening time. The day was raw and foggy, the heating barely sufficient to dispel the bone-numbing chill of the journey, but Julia was conscious only of her need to recover the anonymous black volume, which meant finding the man who had brought it to her, for she could not recall even seeing a press-mark. Since waking early from a troubled sleep she had been prey to increasing doubt as to whether she had actually read the account of the scene in the street, or had merely been confused by an especially striking instance of the experience the French term déjà vu. Like others of her acquaintance she had occasionally found herself, for the space of a few sentences, in the midst of a conversation which seemed oddly familiar, but nothing remotely like yesterday's experience had ever befallen her.

The search for the tall, nondescript attendant proved, however, hopeless. She found herself entirely unable to describe him with any accuracy, save that he was tall and had been clad, she thought, in a grey suit of some kind; her memory simply refused to summon him as anything more than a blurred outline of a man. The attendants on duty did their best to accommodate her; three possible candidates were summoned from the nether regions for her inspection, but without result. They were however adamant in maintaining that the delivery of a volume without a press-mark was an impossibility; author and tide might conceivably be dispensed with, but a book without a press-mark, madam, would be like a soul without a name upon the Day of Judgment: it could never arise, and would be lost for all eternity. Julia could see the force of this; she could see, too, that to persist would merely confirm their evident belief that the book had been delivered to her only in a dream (she had, of course, said nothing about what had followed in the street) and so she returned, bewildered, to her place.

Sitting in the same seat as she had occupied the previous afternoon dispelled the doubts that had gathered overnight; the book had certainly been delivered to her; she could visualise the words at the foot of that first page, see herself trying to turn to the next and finding the opening uncut. Several times she walked the circumference of the room, searching for the attendant in grey, but with no success. The fog hanging about the dome seemed even thicker than it had yesterday, and readers unusually scarce; apart from a motionless figure several seats away to her left, she had a whole row to herself. To quieten her mind, she set about writing a full account of her experience, and became quite absorbed in the attempt to recall and record every detail. The damp air grew closer and stuffier; she could feel the warmth rising from the heat-pipe beneath the desk as she wrote on, half mesmerised by the steady scratching of her own pen. After an indefinite interval, she became aware, as she reached mechanically for the inkwell, that the scratching of her pen had become the only sound within her hearing; and she looked up to find herself entirely surrounded by fog.

Her first thought was that someone must have left a door or window open, but that was plainly absurd: she had never seen fog of this intensity inside a building before; it must be some freak of nature. She sat within a little cocoon of light shed by the electric lamp above her place; there was only the usual faint halo about the shade, but the edge of the fog-bank swirled to within two feet of her on either side, and overhead. Cold wisps of it curled across her desk, bearing a strange, ashy, sulphur-salt smell, as of a huge sea-creature suddenly emerging from the depths. She was-or had been-perhaps two-thirds of the way out from the central circle where the catalogue was kept; all she had to do was get up and make her way carefully to her left, and then left again around the circumference of the room until she reached the main entrance. But what would she do then? The fog must be even more impenetrable outside, and besides, there was something profoundly unnerving about it, something that made her very reluctant to leave her small circle of light. Perhaps she should call out; but why could she not hear anyone else calling for assistance? There had been other readers in neighbouring rows; and was it not the attendants' duty to go about and reassure those who might otherwise fall prey to panic? Yet still there was no sound other than the faint, muffled susurration of the fog-bank.

But surely fog did not make any sound? That soft rustling away to her left was not the fog; it was someone coming stealthily up the row towards her. Julia held her breath, listening. The rustling came closer, and ceased; the swirling wall of fog remained utterly opaque; then she heard the faint scrape of a chair-it sounded like the chair immediately to her left-being drawn out, followed by the almost inaudible creak of the seat as someone, or something, settled themselves upon it.

Silence returned. Julia tried to tell herself that it was only another reader, lost in the fog and deciding to sit down until it cleared. But the trembling of her hands belied her. Very slowly, keeping her eyes on the fog-bank between herself and her invisible companion, Julia began to ease herself off her chair, hoping to slip away silently in the other direction, towards the catalogue. Her chair creaked loudly, and as it did so the wall of fog to her left rose up like a curtain.

IN THAT FIRST GLIMPSE, JULIA WAS RELIEVED, THOUGH startled, to discover that the chair beside her was occupied by a child, a little girl of no more than eight, with golden curls and pink cheeks, dressed in a starched white frock and petticoats. The reassurance lasted only an instant. There was something fixed and unnatural about the bright, smiling face turned towards Julia, and especially about the eyes, which had been slightly downcast, but suddenly opened wide with an audible click They were the shoe-button eyes of a doll; the face looked as hard and rigid as porcelain; and yet the creature was alive, for it was swinging its legs around with the evident intention of sliding off its chair and coming over to Julia.

All of Julia's hair stood on end; or such was the sensation. The "click" of those eyes snapping open seemed to lodge in her own body with a visceral jolt of terror such as she would not have believed a human being could endure. If the smiling doll-creature touched her, she knew she would die; she could not cry out, for the fear was choking her. Its satin shoes touched the floor; Julia sprang up, knocking over her own chair, and backed away into the wall of fog. Blundering from chair to chair, with still no sign of another human being, she retreated until she collided painfully with what felt like the circular bookcase which housed the catalogue, groped her way along its edge, and lurched into what she hoped was another alleyway of desks, where she stopped and tried to hold her breath and still her pulse enough to listen for the rustle of her pursuers dress.

From the moment Julia left her seat, the fog had closed impermeably about her. If she held her hand so close that her fingers actually touched her face, she could see the outline of it, but beyond that distance she might as well have been immersed in cotton wool, through which filtered a dim, uniform, yellow-grey light. Even in normal circumstances, the Reading Room has a labyrinthine aspect; some have compared it to a spiders web; but because it is possible to see over the tops of the rows of desks and across the central bookcases, these sinister possibilities lie mostly dormant. If all light were to be extinguished, one might imagine that the regularity of its construction, with the rows of desks radiating out from the centre like the spokes of a wheel, would still render escape relatively straightforward. But in fact, merely by pausing to listen, Julia found that she had lost all sense of direction. The strange sea-creature smell confused her senses, and the blood would not stop ringing in her ears. She could not hear, yet she knew that to run blindly would be fatal; the noise of her flight would give her away. Besides-she tried to suppress the realisation, but could not-the creature had found her in spite of the fog. Julia began to tremble uncontrollably.

Noise might be fatal, but to remain waiting for a porcelain hand to insinuate itself into hers was quite unbearable. She took a slow step backwards and bumped against a chair, which scraped; set off in what she thought was the right direction and encountered a cold, vertical surface which she could not identify at all, and from there veered into empty space, losing even her sense of up and down. She felt herself falling; reached out to save herself and clutched at a narrow ledge or flange, which seemed at first solid but suddenly gave way with a rasp, shot from her hand and fell at her feet with a dreadful smash. The creature would be upon her any second; Julia stumbled back into the void, and this time managed to hand herself from chair to chair along the entire length of a row. The noise was frightful, despite the muffling effect of the fog several chairs fell behind her, but she kept on, and when nothing met her hand after the expected interval, threw herself forward with both arms outstretched until she collided with what, she prayed, was the bookcase that ran right around the circumference of the Reading Room. Instinct told her that if she were to follow the curve around to her left, she would eventually arrive at the main entrance, where help must surely be at hand.

Julia stopped again to listen, but her breathing would not slow. Terror had left no room for any thought beyond the desire for escape; she set off again, as fast as she dared, with her right hand brushing along the curved bookcase and her left stretched out before her. In a surprisingly short time she came to an opening, which, she told herself, must be the entrance; she felt her way through, stumbled for some distance in another void, and collided with a wall. No, a door, for it swung away under her weight, and she went on through, quite unable to visualise the foyer in sufficient detail to tell whether she was in it or not. She took a few steps forward, but the floor did not feel right underfoot; it had a hollow, skeletal quality about it; then she brushed against a cold, vertical metal surface, which certainly did not match her recollection of anything in the foyer. Running her hand across the metal surface beside her, Julia realised that it was the end of a bookshelf. Reaching around it, she disturbed a volume which fell over with a thud, and all at once understood where she must be. This was the Iron Library, a maze of shelves crammed with books in their numberless thousands. If she could not regain the door through which she had entered, she would be utterly lost.

But perhaps help was closer at hand than she had thought, for was that not the faint sound of voices? And quite close by; perhaps it was only the muffling effect of the fog that made it sound like whispering. She took a step forward, keeping one hand on the metal surface to her left, and now the sound was even clearer, though oddly repetitive in its cadence, as if someone were whispering the same word over and over. Her hand slid off into space and across to the end of another shelf: and yes, the voice was coming from the aisle between the shelves; it seemed to be rising up from the floor as the fog once more lifted to reveal the doll-child's upturned porcelain smile, the shoe-button eyes opening wide, painted fingers reaching towards the hem of Julia's dress, and the rosebud mouth opening and closing mechanically, whispering "Julia… Julia… Julia…"

Thus began a fearful game of hide-and-seek which drove Julia ever further into the gloomy depths of the Iron Library. The fog had thinned somewhat, so that she could see from one end of an aisle to the other, but that only worsened the terror of seeing the painted smile appearing from around a stack or worse, coming up behind her as she paused, wondering which way to flee. Though the creatures head came no higher than Julia's waist, the thought of turning upon it, or trying to kick it out of her way, only prompted a further spasm of horror; she knew she could not endure its slightest touch, and so could only retreat until she ran up against an iron staircase spiralling up into the foggy darkness overhead.

Her pursuer was not at that moment in sight, but there was no other way back. Shuddering at the image of the doll-child lurking in wait for her, Julia began to climb. But she could not keep the staircase from sounding beneath her feet; her footsteps rang out over the fog-bank which now rolled back below her, so that she could neither see nor hear whether the creature was following. She passed an exit onto a narrow metal gallery and kept climbing higher and higher, with the fog still rising so that it swirled continuously just below her hurrying feet.

Soon she could go no higher; the last turn brought her out onto another gallery, whose floor, like the others in the Iron Library, was a sort of grid, so that one could see through it to the fog drifting just beneath. On one side of her was a sheer dark wall, on the other a handrail, through which, as she paused wondering which direction to take, she could feel a faint rhythmic drumming, as of footsteps coming lightly and rapidly up from below. Julia began to retreat along the gallery as fast as she dared, glancing frequently over her shoulder. There was no sign of the doll-child yet; but she saw that she was coming to a dead end; there was nothing ahead of her but an end-rail, and no more stairs.

A cold gust of air rose about her; the wall of fog rolled back and seemed to dissolve upon the instant, and Julia found herself looking down from a great height, at row upon row of skeletal iron floors plummeting away into darkness. Vertigo seized her as it had on the brink of Frederick's balcony. Simultaneously, the doll-child emerged onto the gallery and trotted purposefully towards her, the painted smile broadening, its tread sounding heavier with every step. Caught between the terror of falling and dread at the creature's approach, Julia pressed herself against the wall. The porcelain arms reached out; the eyes clicked wide open. As a cry of repulsion rose ungovernably in Julia's throat, her fingers found a handle. Part of the wall gave way with a crash, flinging her out upon another gallery, beneath a vast, win-dowed hemisphere which took up her cry and sent it ringing and reverberating across the Reading Room, high above a sea of upturned faces.

THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON FOUND JULIA, SOMEWHAT to her own surprise, back in the library. Her interview with the Chief Attendant had been long and humiliating: he had looked at her so strangely when she first mentioned the fog that she spoke, thereafter, only of taking a wrong turn and finding herself lost in the Iron Library. When asked why she had climbed the stair, she could only reply that she had mistaken it for the way out. But he was plainly not satisfied: she had, he said sternly, broken several regulations, ignored numerous notices, created a disturbance in the Reading Room, and placed herself in serious danger. The Trustees would have to be informed, and might well decide to suspend her ticket.

What had actually occurred remained unfathomable. Julia had been followed onto the Reading Room gallery, not by the doll-child, but by an attendant who had noticed a woman ascending the staircase in the Iron Library. The only rational explanation she could conceive of was sleep-walking, but she could not quite believe it. There was, of course, the darker possibility that her mind had given way under the strain of prolonged grief. Yet she could not shake off the sense that the anonymous black book and the terrifying encounter in the fog were in some way connected. Besides which she had discovered, in the course of another troubled night, that fear of the doll-child's renewed attentions had followed her home. Until she could discover the meaning of these events, she would not feel secure, and instinct told her that the answer must be sought in the Reading Room, to which she accordingly returned, heavily veiled and in other ways disguised as far as possible.

The afternoon outside was bright and clear, the dome filled with light and entirely free of fog, which at least implied that she would be safe from a renewal of yesterday's terrors. But although an inspection of the upper gallery confirmed that she had been too high above the readers' desks for her features to be easily discerned, Julia felt most conspicuous and ill-at-ease. To inquire any further after the anonymous black book was obviously impossible. But wait: there was, after all, a section of the catalogue devoted to anonymous works, and she might as well look through it as sit uncomfortably wondering whether the voices murmuring on the other side of the partition were murmuring about her.

"Anon", however, proved far more prolific than Julia had anticipated. She had begun her search on the principle of the child's game of "warm or cold", filling out an application for any title which looked remotely promising. But mindful of the notice discouraging readers from requesting numerous books at any one time, and of her already uncertain standing in the Reading Room, she found her progress-or lack of it-so slow that the light was fading from the dome before she had surveyed even a fraction of the tides beginning with "A". It would clearly take weeks or months, with no likelihood of success… but what was this?

A Full and True Account of the Strange Events leading to the Death of the Poet Frederick Liddell Esq., on the night of Thursday 2nd March, 1899. 8vo. London. 1899.

The date given was today's, or rather tonights: an impossibility, but there it was, starkly presenting itself to Julia's uncomprehending gaze. The printed entry slip, which looked as if it had only just been pasted in, was set out in the usual fashion, and accompanied by a press-mark which, together with the first few words of the title, Julia had numbly copied onto an application slip and deposited at the issue desk before the import of the words had even begun to sink in. It must be another Frederick Liddell, an inner voice kept repeating, but she knew this to be false; she had looked up his name in the catalogue too often, formerly for the pleasure and latterly for the pain of seeing it printed there. Almost any other reader, confronting the same entry, would have attributed it to clerical error, or at worst an elaborate and distasteful hoax; to Julia, the words emblazoned upon her inward vision seemed like a declaration of the inevitable.

Fifteen minutes crawled by, and then a half-hour. The electric lights came on; the windows in the dome darkened steadily; Julia waited in growing apprehension with her thoughts revolving as upon a treadmill. Should she not go to his rooms and see if he was there, to warn him? But warn him of what? To know exactly where and when the danger lay, she would have to see the book… but then the rational part of her mind would rise up in protest, only to be subdued in turn by a vivid recollection of the immense woman bearing the coffin-shaped parcel, so that she sat paralysed between these warring inner factions until an attendant came to inform her that no record of any such volume could be found. Julia returned at once to the catalogue; she could visualise the position of the entry quite clearly, in the top right-hand quarter of a right-hand page, but realised, when it did not appear in the expected place, that she had absolutely no recollection of its surroundings. Because new entries were constantly being pasted in, their order was not always precisely alphabetical, but she searched many pages in either direction without finding what she sought. This, however, only heightened her sense of foreboding. It was black night outside; she could delay no longer, no matter what humiliation might follow. But if she were not home soon, even her husband might become anxious enough to initiate a search. Hastily scribbling a note to say that she would be dining with Marianne, Julia gathered up her things and rushed from the Reading Room.

THE NIGHT AIR WAS DAMP AND STILL, WITH A HINT OF mist about the street lamps, as Julia rang the bell at the street door below Frederick's rooms. There was a long wait, made even longer by the combined weight of foreboding and painful recall, before the door was opened by an ancient porter.

Her apprehension increased with every one of the seemingly endless flights of stairs, and she was obliged to pause even longer than was necessary to recover her breath before she could summon the courage to knock at Frederick's door. All had been silent within; at the sound of her tapping the silence seemed only to deepen; then there was a muffled thud, followed by the sound of rapid footsteps and a clatter of locks and bolts being undone. Almost worse than the dread of what she might encounter was the resurgence of a hope so long repressed, a hope that flared wildly at the first sight of his face, so pale and gaunt and worn, suddenly radiant with an answering joy. She had crossed the threshold and flung her arms around him-feeling at once how dreadfully thin he had become-and kissed him with all the passion of her resurrected love, before the name he was so tenderly murmuring resolved itself as, undeniably; "Lydia".

JULIA DISENGAGED HERSELF AND DREW BACK, SEARCHING the well-remembered face for some sign of recognition. It was, and yet was not, the Frederick of old: unshaven, clad in a crumpled shirt and trousers and a pair of old carpet slippers, with a frayed green dressing-gown over his shoulders, his hair even longer and more disorderly, but lacking its former lustre. His adoring expression did not change, but he seemed to be gazing through rather than at her face. For a moment she feared that he was blind, until he evidently noticed the open door, which he reached out and closed behind her. As it clicked shut, an expression of bewilderment crossed his face; he looked from her-or rather, from the person he evidently saw in her place-to the door and back again.

"It is finished, and you have come," he said in a strange abstracted tone, "but I expected… I thought you would have…"

He trailed off, glancing towards the French windows, which Julia saw were open to the night. Despite the fire burning in the grate opposite, she felt the chill draught from the balcony. She did not want to understand his implication, nor did she wish to believe him mad. Might he be sleep-walking? And if he stood, as it were, in the midst of a dream of Lydia, might he not be woken…? But even as she opened her mouth to cry, I am Julia, not Lydia, the futility of it overwhelmed her. Dreaming or waking, Frederick had given his whole heart to a dead woman, and there was no room in it for the living; that love was ashes, and would arise no more.

Besides, she had somewhere read or heard that sleep-walkers should not be woken abruptly, but coaxed back to bed and watched until they fell into a true sleep, from which they would awaken with no recollection of the previous nights encounters. There flashed upon her the conviction that she understood the omens of recent days, for had she not come to him tonight, Frederick might well have plunged heedlessly to his death. The first thing, therefore, was to close the French windows; no, first get him safely into bed, then secure them.

"Frederick," she said, gently taking his arm, "you are very tired, and must rest now."

"Yes, I am very tired," he repeated. "But-you will not leave me, Lydia? Not now?" His voice rose and quavered on the last words.

"No, Frederick," said Julia sadly, "I will not leave you. But you must go to bed now, and sleep."

With that she led him slowly across the room, staying as far as possible from the dark doorway opening onto the night, and along the passageway to his bedroom, now dreadfully stale and disordered. He stood obediently, like a child, while she straightened the bedclothes as best she could and turned back the sheet; like a child he sat on the edge of the bed and removed his slippers and dressing-gown, then immediately lay down and composed himself for sleep. His eyes had closed before Julia had settled the bedclothes about his shoulders, and within the space of a minute the rhythm of his breathing had slowed and deepened. She watched him for a few minutes more, recalling how often and how ardently she had yearned to watch over Frederick whilst he slept. Now her prayer had been answered, and all she could feel was a profound weariness of spirit. His breathing slowed still further; Julia would have liked to open the window, but was afraid of disturbing him, and so turned down the gas and went back to the sitting-room.

SHE HAD MEANT TO CLOSE THE FRENCH WINDOWS IMmediately, but the staleness of the bedroom seemed to have followed her down the passage, and it was not, after all, especially cold; she would close one side and leave the other open for the moment. But on her way over, her attention was drawn to the desk beneath the right-hand window. A lamp burned beside the portrait of Lydia, placed so that it also illuminated a loose sheaf of papers, which were secured by a crystal paperweight Julia was uncomfortably reminded of a votive offering. The uppermost sheet bore two stanzas in Frederick's small, precise hand:

The midnight moth besieg'd the lamp,

The magic casement opened wide;

I heard at last the soft wing-heat

Of my returning bride;

And, as I hand still farther out

Upon the unresisting night,

Saw my beloved hovering near,

Enraptur'd with the gift of flight

The ink looked quite fresh, as if this were the final page of a fair copy which had not yet been put into its proper order. Julia drew out the chair and sat down, meaning to examine the rest of the manuscript, but found herself intimidated by Lydia's cool, proprietorial stare, which in the lamplight seemed unnervingly watchful. She stretched out a hand to turn the pictures eyes away from hers, but as she leaned forward, her foot thudded against something hollow beneath the desk. There was, indeed, scarcely enough room for her feet, and she bent down to see what the obstruction was. A window-box? No; too low, and she had felt it move. But its proportions were somehow familiar. A black, rectangular box, about three feet long: some musical instrument, perhaps? Curiosity impelled her to set aside her chair and draw the thing out from beneath the desk. It proved surprisingly light for its size. No doubt it would be locked; but the first of the three silver catches snapped open when she touched the knob; the other two followed suit, so there could be no harm in raising the lid.

Whatever it contained was, however, concealed beneath a purple velvet covering. Julia was kneeling alongside the box, and as she reached in to draw aside the covering, she overbalanced so that her right hand slid beneath the purple velvet and encountered something hard. There was a flash of white; she tried to snatch her hand away, but something caught it fast with a hot, piercing sensation, and the doll-child sat up and opened its eyes.

The porcelain fingers gripped like the needle-sharp teeth of a serpent; with her free hand, Julia tried to fend the creature off, but it seemed to leap from its box as she recoiled through the French windows and fell heavily against the balcony railing. She felt the creature dragging her over; for one dreadful instant it hung, smiling, in mid-air before its grip upon Julia's hand was broken and the doll-child went whirling down into the void; whole seconds seemed to pass before Julia heard it smash upon the pavement.

She remained, clinging to the railing, until the worst of the shock had subsided. But the piercing sensation in her right hand did not diminish; one of the serpent-fingers must have lodged in it. Shuddering, she lifted her hand to the light and discovered that the source of the pain was, in fact, a hat-pin, driven deep into the side of her palm. Bunched beneath the head of the pin were several torn folds of white material. Clenching her teeth, she drew out the pin and dropped it over the rail; then she stood up and leaned over to see if she could discern the fragments of the doll by the light of the street lamp below. She was too far up to make anything out, but as she watched, a small figure shuffled into the pool of light and seemed to be stooping over something in the road.

Julia became suddenly conscious of where she was, but vertigo did not follow. She felt she could stay here, leaning on the rail, for as long as she liked. But there was nothing to stay for, and her hand was throbbing painfully. She returned to the sitting room, closed the doors, restored the empty box to its place, and exchanged a final glance with Lydia's portrait. The eyes had lost their wariness; indeed the picture seemed to have faded, to have become simply a photograph of a young woman seeking to make the most of her beauty for the camera. Julia wondered, as she turned away, if she would ever see the poem in print, but it was addressed to Lydia, not to her; all that was left for her to do was to ensure that a doctor would be summoned. Looking in upon Frederick for the last time, Julia saw that he was smiling faintly in his sleep. She left him dreaming of the dead, and went wearily down the stairs to rejoin the world of the living.

I EMERGED FROM THE STORY WITH THE SENSATION OF waking from a dream in which I was Julia, and dreadfully cold, and the Reading Room had slipped its moorings and floated out to sea. The dome was palpably revolving; I could feel the sway of the waves as I struggled up from the depths, only to find that I was already awake, with a burning forehead and a deep, shivering ache in every bone. Walking back to Russell Square tube station, I was shaking so hard I had to clench my teeth to stop them chattering. From amongst the press of bodies in the lift, a desolate male voice announced to the world at large, 'Ah'm not happy. Ah feel bad. Ah'm depressed.' 'Aren't we fuckin' all,' muttered a man behind me. Crammed into our filthy metal cage, steeped in the farmyard stench of sodden clothing, we sank in silence into the earth.

For the next ten days I shivered and sweated and coughed, drifting in and out of dreams in which the doll-child appeared several times. Worst of all was a recurring nightmare in which I pursued a fleeting figure, who might or might not have been Alice, through a maze of deserted streets and derelict buildings. Usually she would vanish; once I cornered her in a blind alley and she turned to me with a face of stone. Outside the rain pelted down upon the icy slush, through which I slithered to the chemist for more drugs, or to the nearest cheap restaurant for another oily Indian meal. The Westland affair fizzled and died. The space shuttle blew up. The Iron Lady went on and on.

Three days before I was due to leave, I thought about taking a train from Waterloo to Balcombe, a village about three miles north-east of Staplefield. The least I could do was see the village and ask around. But as I looked again at the tiny black circle marked on the B2114, all I could feel was 'what's the point?' I tried to summon the old sense of wonder and refuge, but it was like feeling for a lost tooth. Without Alice-by now I had convinced myself that I would never hear from her again-Staplefield was dead and gone.

On my last day, a Saturday, a watery sun came out. I took a bus to Hampstead Heath and walked up to the top of Parliament Hill, where I did at last feel some sense of awe at the great sweep of the city below. But the wind was keen and biting, and so cold my fillings began to ache. I descended to the swimming ponds, shuddering at the sight of the icy green water in which some madwoman was actually swimming. Dodging pushchairs and bicycles, I wandered the muddy gravel paths as far as the Vale of Health, and came back along the boundary road.

I HADN'T IMAGINED I WOULD WELCOME THE HEAT AND glare of a Mawson summer. When I emerged from customs, my mother hugged me as if I had returned from the dead.

'But you're so thin, Gerard. What's happened to you?'

I told her about the flu, and agreed I should have gone to a doctor. There didn't seem to be much else to say. After breakfast we sat with our coffee under a flowering gum in the back yard. Crimson filaments drifted across the lawn; the sky was a dazzling blue. Breathing the dry, pungent scent of eucalyptus, I couldn't help thinking that it was better to be desolate and warm than desolate and frozen.

'-were you too ill to do anything at all, dear?' my mother was saying.

The only thing I could think of was my walk on Hampstead Heath. Idly watching a pair of rosellas as I talked, I was unprepared for the outburst.

'How could you be so reckless, Gerard? You might have been murdered!'

Her forehead was beaded with sweat, though it had been dry a moment before.

'It was a Saturday afternoon, Mother. There were people everywhere.'

'People get dragged off those paths, all the time. And never seen again. I've read about it. Anything could have happened to you.'

I tried to reassure her, but she would not listen, and shortly afterwards she said she was going inside to lie down.

c/o Penfriends International,

Box 294, Mount Pleasant PO,

London WC1

31 January 1986

Dearest Gerard,

I'm so sorry, I've only just got your letters (the ones you wrote while you were here) because I've been in hospital. Don't worry, everything's fine now-wonderful in fact. There's a real chance that in a couple of years' time I'll be walking again! I've been on Mr MacBride's waiting list-he's a neurosurgeon-for ages, and I thought it would be months more, but then he had a cancellation on New Year's Day and they whisked me off to Guy's Hospital in an ambulance. Only I didn't know where you were staying because your letter from Mawson with the hotel address in it must have been delayed in the post-it was waiting with the others when I got back yesterday.

I would have written much sooner, only there were complications with the dye they injected into my spine for the X-rays-God, those endless hours lying in the scanner, trying not to move, or even breathe-anyway I got terribly sick and spent two weeks on a drip because I couldn't keep anything down. I had a monster headache that never stopped, and my eyesight went so blurry I thought I was going blind-this often happens, apparently, with spinal injections-it's almost back to normal now. I thought of you all the time but I was just too ill to write.

I would have told you about the tests only I just couldn't bear to raise our hopes-you know how superstitious I am-until I knew for certain there was something to hope for. And there is, there truly is. Mr MacBride is working with a new laser technique for splitting healthy nerves to replace the damaged ones, and he thinks that in a year or two-it just needs one more breakthrough with the lasers, he says-he'll be able to operate with a ninety per cent chance of success!

This must go now to catch today's post; I've told them to send it express. I'm so sorry about the mix-up with letters and that you had such a miserable time in London-I'll make it up to you, I promise.

More, much more, tomorrow.

I love and adore you with all my heart, and I'm longing to hear from you.

Your invisible lover

Alice

If Alice had told me then that I would have to wait another thirteen years… but it was never going to be thirteen years, only 'another year or two at the most'. And the longer I waited, the more I had to lose by not waiting just a few months longer. Alice finished her degree with the Open University and took up teaching English by correspondence to disabled students. Somewhere around the five-year mark, she promised me that we would be together after the operation, even if it failed. Then why not now? 'I want to run into your arms,' she would say, 'and now that we've come so far, please, please can we wait just a little longer?' By the time I persuaded her to go on to email, we had exchanged over four thousand letters through Penfriends International.

I had a life, of sorts, and friends, up to a point. But never any real intimacy; sooner rather than later, every friendship ran up against the wall behind which Alice lay hidden. So long as I keep her secret, I would tell myself, she will be healed, we will be together. As in those fairy tales in which all will be well so long as a certain question is never asked, or a prohibition disobeyed. Never enter my chamber during the hours of darkness.

In all this time, my mother and I kept to our undeclared agreement: she didn't ask about Alice, and I didn't ask about her past. It never seemed worth moving out of the house because I never meant to wait thirteen years. Everyone at the library assumed I was gay, but too timid to leave the closet-at least that was what I assumed they assumed. Quiet, polite, still living at home with his mother, never seems to go out, never talks about himself: no one, I imagined them saying, could possibly be that boring. Not even Gerard. I went on working at the library and staying at home with Mother, while the longed-for breakthrough in microsurgery shimmered on the horizon, always just another year away.

Not leaving my mother alone with her legion of terrors became part of my bargain with God-a God I didn't believe in, but a bargain nonetheless: I'll look after Mother if you'll make sure Alice is healed. Looking after Mother meant, above all else, not leaving her alone at night. Her conviction that the danger was out there, like the snake in the woodpile, had never wavered. She had endured, rather than lived, nearly four decades in Mawson, but I had never seen her bored; she had been too absorbed in her vigil, too intent on catching the slightest whisper of snakeskin over bark. Call it paranoia, chronic anxiety syndrome, obsessive compulsive disorder or common-or-garden neurosis; no matter how many labels you stuck on it, the serpent had been real to her. As her seventieth birthday approached, I noticed that she was losing weight and colour, and that her skin had taken on a greyish tinge. But she refused to see a doctor. She went on listening to inaudible sounds until the tumour had grown too large to ignore.

A fortnight after the oncologist told me there was nothing more he could do, Mr MacBride put Alice on his waiting list. I said nothing to my mother. In just under two months, if all went well, Alice would walk out of the hospital. In the last week of July, about when my mother was expected to die.

'YOU'VE BEEN A GOOD SON TO ME, GERARD.'

I did not feel like a good son. I had resented her devotion too often and too bitterly for that. We were speaking as usual in clichés, the tireder the better. The silence between us had always been more profound than anything we had managed to say to each other. Now it filled the house like the hum of defective wiring.

She was propped up on the daybed in the sunroom, her book face down on the blanket, looking out over the garden. Drifts of fallen leaves had gathered around the trunks of trees, against the garage wall, along the back fence. This time last year, she would have wanted them all swept away. Afternoon sunlight slanted across the floor; I had already closed the window against the encroaching chill.

I was home on leave from the library, doing what little cooking was required. Now that she needed morphine to sleep at night, my mother would accept nothing solid, only soup and fruit juice and hot drinks. When darkness came, I would help her up the hall to her bedroom. She could still walk, with difficulty.

I reached across from my chair beside the head of her bed, and touched her hand. She did not turn back from the window, but her cold fingers closed over mine, and we stayed like that for a while, watching the crimson leaves stirring beneath the flame tree. It struck me, not for the first time, that she might have been happier with no son at all.

Her fingers twitched; she was drifting into sleep. I reached over with my other hand and picked up her book, so that it would not slide off and wake her. A battered Pan paperback: Josephine Tey, To Love and be Wise. She must have read that one a dozen times. From bargain tables and goodwill stores she had amassed a vast collection of detective stories, all English and nothing after the 1950s: Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, John Dickson Carr, Marjorie Allingham, Josephine Tey, Freeman Wills Crofts, Ernest Brahmah, J.J. Connington and more. She would alternate these with anything from Daphne Du Maurier to Elizabeth Bowen or Henry James, but beyond 'I think you'll like this, dear', or 'not as good as so-and-so, I thought', she never discussed her reading, which-or so I sometimes imagined-had come to revolve more and more around the lost country-house world of her childhood with Viola at Staplefield.

The sun was sinking into the canopy of our flowering gum, the tallest of all the trees we had planted. I could remember our back yard as a summer dustbowl, the year the town's reservoirs threatened to run dry and hoses were banned. The dead grass had blown away with the topsoil before the end of the holidays. Our parched saplings, surrounded by cylinders of wire netting to keep off the rabbits, were kept alive by surreptitious buckets of water. My mother would sometimes doze in here in the afternoons, blinds drawn against the glare, pedestal fan rattling in the doorway; she used to say it might be hotter out here, but it wasn't as airless as her bedroom.

The fingers clasping mine twitched again. Her face was still turned away from me. As it had been that afternoon when I tiptoed up to the door to see if she was safely asleep. Sitting here beside my mother, day after day, I had tried several times to recall the face in the photograph. Sometimes I felt sure I was remembering perfectly, the light falling across her neck, the mass of dark brown hair-but how could I know that when the picture had been black and white? Then the certainty would dissolve and I would be left with only the memory of vividness, not the face itself. As with Viola and Staplefield-there had been a tall house, and a pavilion on a hill, a friend called Rosalind, a picturebook village-and that was all I could recover. Oh and a wicket gate, whatever that looked like. And a walk through some woods with badgers and some other creature-rabbits? hares?-and an old man with a cart who delivered… milk, eggs? Surely there must have been more, far more?

And then the stories had ceased. She had looked ten feet high in the bedroom doorway, Medusa hair flying, incandescent with fury. But why, Mother, why? Why would you never talk to me about Viola?

'I loved her,' said my mothers voice.

The hair on the back of my neck bristled. Her face was still turned away from me. Had I spoken aloud? Was she talking in her sleep?

'You loved Viola?' I asked, keeping my voice low and my hand still in hers.

'Yes… loved me too.'

'Then why-why couldn't we talk about Viola, you and I?'

The papery fingers tightened a little.

'I had to keep you safe.'

'Mother I am safe; I'm here with you.'

She stirred; her head turned slowly towards me. Her eyes did not open; her expression remained calm.

'Then talk to me now,' I said after a pause. 'About Viola-' but what could I ask her? My mind had gone blank. 'Tell me-did she always live at Staplefield?'

Unease crept over her face. I sat very still and waited until her expression grew calm again.

'Viola wrote stories. Tell me about them.'

'Ghos' stories. She wrote ghost stories.'

The voice had grown more animated. Her eyes flicked open, stared directly at me, and closed again.

Then she said something that sounded like, 'one came true'.

'Did you say, one came true? How? What do you mean?'

No answer.

'Mother, what came true?'

Her grip on my fingers tightened. Her eyelids fluttered, her breathing quickened. Again no answer.

'Mother, who was the woman in the photograph I found? Was it Viola?'

Her eyes shot open, glaring.

'NO!' It came as a hoarse shriek. She sat bolt upright. The unseeing eyes settled on my face.

'Gerard? Why are you here?'

'Mother, come back-you're having a bad dream-'

'You shouldn't be here. She'll see you-'

Her face was convulsing again.

'Mother, wake up!'

Recognition came back. She sank down amongst the pillows.

'Gerard.'

'You were dreaming, Mother.'

She lay silent for a while, breathing harshly.

'Mother-what did you mean, in your dream, she'll see you?'

A quick, uneasy glance.

'How did you know?'

'You were talking in your sleep.'

'I dreamed you were asking me questions, like you used to when you were-what else did I say?'

'You said-you said the woman in the photograph wasn't Viola. Who was she?'

She didn't reply. A different kind of horror was creeping into her expression. As in that moment when you still can't believe you could possibly have done something so appalling. The gas left full on, a child alone in the house.

'Gerard, I'm very tired. I want you to take me back to my room now.' She spoke the words stiffly, through a mask of dread.

'Is the pain very bad?'

'Yes.' But it didn't look like physical pain. We made our slow way up the hall.

'Gerard,' she said when I had settled her into bed, 'bring me the kitchen steps.'

I looked at her, nonplussed.

'The kitchen steps. In case-in case I need to get up.'

'Mother, you've got the buzzer, how can they possibly help-'

'Just bring them.'

'If you insist. But you must promise me-'

'Gerard!'

Bewildered, I went to fetch them: three aluminium steps with a vertical handle to grasp as you climbed up.

'Thank you, dear. Leave them next to my bed-table.'

Her bed was still where it had always been, its headboard centred against the boarded-up fireplace. Floor-to-ceiling cupboards had been built into the alcoves on either side of the chimney. Her bed-table was on the right-hand side of the bed, nearest the door.

'Mother, if there's anything you want me to get down for you-'

'No, dear. What I'd like, if you're not too tired, is for you to make us some more of that nice vegetable soup. I'll have a sleep now. Close the door as you go out.'

She did look utterly exhausted. Reluctantly, I left the room. For several long minutes I hovered outside the door. Not a sound. I eased the handle open and looked in. She was breathing heavily through her mouth. I stood there watching for what felt like many minutes more, but she did not stir.

Something must have alerted me, because I was already through the kitchen door and running when the crash came. I found her on the carpet beside the overturned steps. The topmost cupboard door was half open.

At the hospital they told me she had a depressed fracture of the skull, just above the left eye. All they could do was put her on a drip and wait to see if she recovered consciousness. I sat beside the bed with her hand resting in mine and talked to her as the nurses came and went and the night hours crawled by. Once or twice I thought her dry, rice-papery fingers twitched very slightly in response. Towards morning I must have dozed off, for without any perceptible interval I became aware that her hand had grown colder, and that the only sound of breathing in the room was mine.

A WEEK AFTER THE FUNERAL, I WAS SORTING THROUGH THE papers in the study. The furniture had not altered since my father had died: a five-drawer olive green army surplus filing cabinet, a very small three-drawer desk and a wooden chair filled the entire space.

I was still on leave. Friends from the library would phone and ask if they could call by, and I would make them tea or coffee and agree that it must be very hard for me having been so close to my mother, and what a wonderful person she had been, and feel guilty about counting the days until I could be with Alice.

All of my mother's clothes and shoes had already gone to the goodwill shop. The books were packed and stored. As soon as probate was granted, I would put the house on the market. I had worked my way from the front rooms, starting with my mothers bedroom, right through to the sunroom, without finding a single fragment of her thirty-four years in England. But something of her would be making the return journey. I had decided to scatter her ashes-her cremains', as the funeral director insisted on calling them-at Staplefield. I was trying to persuade Alice to be there too, but she thought this was something I should do alone

ON RETURNING FROM THE HOSPITAL, I HAD GONE STRAIGHT to my mothers room to find whatever it was she had died trying to reach. But there was nothing in the top cupboard except the dust of years and the desiccated shells of millipedes. Each of the enclosed alcoves had a wardrobe-style door from floor to head height opening on to hanging space, and a smaller rectangular door to the high cupboards above. The high cupboards were simply enclosed storage boxes. I looked in the one opposite, but that too was empty. I found nothing on the floor or under the bed, and nothing but clothes in the wardrobes on either side. Or in the bottom drawer of her dressing-table, where I had seen the photograph, and later 'Seraphina'; I had found it unlocked and empty. If she had managed to remove anything from the cupboard before she fell, she must have swallowed it.

I had deliberately put off opening the filing cabinet in the study, saving it until last; so long as I hadn't looked, I might still find something. There were papers here all right. Masses of them. My father had evidently filed every piece of official correspondence he had ever received, receipts for every bill he had ever paid; and my mother had followed his example religiously. Thirty-six years of electricity bills, stamped and receipted and filed in strict chronological order. A folder full of notices dating back to 4 January 1964, warning the householder that the supply of electricity would be interrupted on such and such a day. Ditto for water and council rates, insurance, tax returns, car service, registration, driving licences, medical bills. Receipts, instructions, guarantees, and full service history for every appliance they had ever owned. All of my old school reports. On and on. It looked as if the only papers my mother had not kept were personal letters, assuming she had ever received any. Or anything that might indicate she had ever lived anywhere but Mawson.

I moved on to the desk. Writing paper in the top drawer, pens, pencils and rulers in the second, envelopes in the third. And at the back of the envelope drawer, a packet of unused aerograms so ancient they belonged in a museum. Australia. 9d. Slipped in amongst them was a stiff blue envelope, unsealed, which also looked very old; the dark brown glue on the flap was cracked and flaking.

Inside the envelope was a black and white photograph of my mother with me, only a few months old, perched on her knee in one of those miniature flying suits that babies wear, beaming up at her and waving one chubby hand in obvious excitement. I didn't recognise the room, or the sofa she was sitting on. She was smiling at me, looking amazingly youthful, far younger than she appeared in her wedding photograph. And different. For a start, her hair was much longer than I could recall; longer and curlier and more abundant. Her dress-I didn't know enough about fashion to say exactly, but it was more stylish than anything I could remember her in; and sleeveless, which she didn't usually wear, even in summer.

And there was something else unusual, apart from her looking so extraordinarily young and carefree. In the albums in the sitting room we had innumerable photographs of me at every possible stage of development, but nearly all of them were of me and my father, or of me alone. My mother's dislike of being photographed had extended even to being photographed with me; in the ones in which we both appeared, she was invariably looking away from the camera so that you could not see her face. Of all the photographs of her-of us-I had seen, this was by far the most joyful. So why had she hidden it away at the back of a drawer?

I went through the packets of envelopes much more carefully, but there was nothing else in the drawer. Taking the photograph with me, I wandered out of the study and up the hall to her bedroom, not really knowing why. I went over the dressing-table again, removing all the drawers and checking the underside of each one. Nothing but dust, and a reel of white thread which had fallen down inside the cabinet.

The kitchen steps were still where I had left them, beneath the right-hand cupboard. Could she possibly have been looking for this photograph? I remembered the horror creeping over her face, that last afternoon in the sunroom.

I had to keep you safe.

From whom? Or what?

You shouldn't he here. She'll see you.

Who would see me? I caught myself glancing uneasily towards the door. Not Viola, surely? I couldn't recall the very last thing she'd said.

Take me back to my room, Gerard. Bring me the steps. Go away and make the soup.

I climbed up for another look at the top cupboard. There were faint marks like scratches on the dusty floor of the cupboard. But the dust was otherwise smooth and undisturbed. The floor was just a sheet-no, two half-sheets-of plywood, the underside presumably forming the top of the wardrobe. I pried at the edge of the right-hand half and it lifted out of the frame.

Only I was not looking down through the wardrobe, but into a shallow recess. In which lay a large sealed envelope. Inside was a thick wad of typewritten sheets. 'The Revenant'. Below that, in the lower right-hand corner of the tide page, 'V.H. 4 Dec 1925' in a clear, spiky hand. I checked the envelope again and found a small printed slip: With the author's compliments.

Still standing on the top step, I began to leaf through the typescript. As I turned to descend, a photograph slid from between the pages and fluttered to the floor.

I HAD IMAGINED THAT IF I EVER SAW HER AGAIN, RECOGNItion would be instantaneous and complete. But it was not quite like that. The dress with shoulders gathered like the wings of angels, the swan-like carriage of her head, chin slightly lifted, gazing off to the left, the dark mass of hair drawn back in what I now knew was called a chignon-all seemed exactly the same, yet I felt sure something had changed. Well of course she looks different, I told myself, I've changed. I was ten when I last saw her. I hadn't heard, then, of chignons, or fine bones, or classically proportioned features: we didn't talk like that at Mawson Primary. Nor had it struck me that she wore no jewellery at all, neither necklace nor earrings. The back of her dress was secured at the neckline by a plain velvet bow.

Of course I hadn't met Alice then, either. This woman didn't look like my imagination of Alice; she was beautiful, but in a more spiritual, less sensuous way. Yet she reminded me of someone; someone I'd seen very recently.

The photograph in the blue envelope. Side by side, the family resemblance was clear; a resemblance that must have faded very quickly, for I couldn't see it in any of my memories of my mother. And since the woman in the studio portrait was, just as clearly, not my mother, who else could she be but the young Viola?

I turned over the photograph and saw that there was writing on the back: a faint inscription in pencil.

'GREENSLEEVES'

10 MARCH 1949

Greensleeves? If that was the date it was taken, it couldn't be Viola after all. But I couldn't imagine this face inspiring horror in anyone. Not even my mother. All these years I'd assumed she had beaten me for looking at the photograph. But she'd never actually said so. And since she'd already disposed of The Chameleon (unless it was hidden somewhere else in the house), I picked up 'The Revenant' again and went through it more carefully. But there was nothing else hidden between the pages. It was just a plain typescript, a fair copy on quarto paper with no corrections or annotations.

One came true. I took the typescript over to the window and settled down on the floor, my back against the wall, with the story my mother had died trying to keep me from reading.

The Revenant