Ivoria, Tanith Lee [popular ebook readers .TXT] 📗

“Shut up. Listen. I know she is meant to be here, at Highgate. I am here. I am waiting for her. She and I are meant to be having lunch.”

“All right,” said Nick. At this juncture he was only slightly confused, not really thinking anything, or only that fucking stupid Laurence had got something wrong again. “She went to some late night private preview stuff yesterday, after the first…”

“I know. Stop telling me crap I know. She told me all that when I spoke to her yesterday. But she was going to stay last night at Highgate. And so was I. So I said, let’s have lunch.”

“OK. Well. She’d have been out late. Maybe she came in after you went to bed.”

“I didn’t get back until three.”

“Maybe she was earlier then. You missed each other. And now she’s asleep.”

“She isn’t. Marj,” (Marj was the au pair) “says Claudia didn’t come in before me. She’d have heard her because Marj was awake and ‘entertaining’ as she puts it, in her room. And anyhow Marj has now gone up with Claudia’s breakfast, since Claudia had asked her for an early call, and the bed’s empty. She didn’t come home, Nick. I called that Samson guy - got his PA - said Claudia left them in a cab before one. So where the fuck is she?”

Nick laughed. It came out like a silly childish giggle.

Laurence blew up. He shouted down the phone.

But Nick grasped instantly his laughter had been that of abrupt and total fear.

For all her life-style, he had never known Claudia to change a plan without telling her family, where it concerned them, she never let them down. She had always been scrupulous in that.

Anything could have happened. She might well have ended up too far away to want the drive back to Highgate - Samson’s PA being mistaken. But she would have let Laurence know. She would even have let Marj know, come to that, if Marj had been expecting her return.

When Laurence stopped shouting, Nick started to say something, and Nick heard his own voice then, sounding remote and frightened. His voice was beginning to break anyway, something that he detested but which he knew was an unavoidable part of growing up. Now this unreliable voice splintered and became only that of a scared little boy, about four or five, and the toast was turning to bile in his guts. And this was the moment Laurence slammed down the phone.

Nick had to go at once to the downstairs guest cloakroom, where he voided his breakfast speedily.

That seen to he called Laurence again. But Marj answered and told him Laurence had just gone out, as she put it, “in a hurry”. Her English was excellent. But as he tried to question her, “No, no,” she kept insisting, “Claudia is not here.” He could get nothing else from her.

Laurence did have a mobile phone, it was the eighties by then. So Nick found his number in the family address folder, and tried to reach it. But the phone was apparently switched off, or else out of order.

Nick sat in the hall, and wondered whether to try to contact his father in Belgium, but years of conditioning, mostly by his mother, warned him Joss, when involved in work, must be left alone. Serena’s whereabouts Nick had no notion of. He felt powerless. He was.

When Mrs Rush came clicking down the hall and told him he should think about going now or he would miss the bus, Nick told her in turn his mother had disappeared.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Nicolas,” she snarled, the partial rhyme making her brusqueness more dire. “Of course she hasn’t.”

“My brother thinks she has.” Nick relayed Laurence’s news, not terribly coherently. “Can’t we…”

“Nicolas, I’d remind you I’m far too busy to start playing games. I know you like to scribble instead of doing your homework, but this isn’t a story. I suggest you hurry off to school and let me get on.”

Nick went back into the lavatory. Then back up to his room. He sat on a chair and started to cry. He knew this was ineffectual and infantile, but he could not help it. He knew - he knew - Claudia was dead.

Obviously, he did not go to catch the bus.

By a strange, if not illogical coincidental twist, neither the abrasive Rush, nor any of the other domestic help, knew he had not left the house. They believed he had gone to school, as was required. So he was offered no lunch, but nor did he want any.

He got on to the bed in the end, and lay on top of the duvet, numb and bleak and mindless and dumb, only hearing the vague noises of the quiet house, birds on the roof, seeing a flick of wings or change of cloud or sun in the sky, and those only from miles down in some deep well of internal non-being.

Seven years after, when Claudia actually died, he had been truly and physically miles away. He had known nothing, beyond - he always believed this - a faint unease throughout that particular day, until Serena called him in the middle of the night.

The horrible dichotomy of that other first day, when he was eleven, was that he knew she could not be dead. And yet he knew she was.

He must have had nightmare fantasies of how or why, the adult Nick concluded, although by then he was never certain. A car crash, probably. That was probably what he thought. What else? She was still so young and so beautiful and so real and alive. Yet dead.

He did try to call Laurence two more times, from the upper hall. But Laurence’s phone was still out.

At about four Nick was going down to the lower house, not really intending any more than to get some water from the kitchen.

Mrs Rush met him on a landing.

“You’re back very early,” she said disapprovingly. “Your sister called. You’re to call her on this