Cruel Pink, Tanith Lee [universal ebook reader TXT] 📗

through her French doors. They were very clean and clear and gave on her sitting room, which was also clean, and scrupulously, nearly soullessly, tidy. Just as with George’s flat, there was too an air of the Mary Celeste, for I could see through into the adjoining dining room, where the table had been laid with cutlery, water glasses and a large cut-glass bowl loaded with lime-green salad and cherry-red tomatoes.

Without thinking, some instinct, I tried one of the glass doors. Which opened.

29

“Vanessa? Auntie Vanessa?”

It sounded infantile, that ‘Auntie’ now, made infinitely more inappropriate, such a teddy-bear word, called in the rough voice of a mature man.

And needless to say, no one answered.

Why do I put it like that? Because I had known, I had known even before I got on the second train, that something had again gone out of kilter. Like George, and his vanishment.

I went methodically through the house. I looked in the five upstairs rooms and the bathroom, and downstairs in the living rooms, the kitchen and cloakroom. I even looked in the oven—cold and void, and in the fridge—stocked with marg and wholemeal, sugar-free jams, and milk and mince and free-range eggs, and with a solitary bottle of wine, not uncorked. The slices of cold meat were out already and arranged on plates. The kettle had been filled from the filter jug, with the decaff standing by in its big chocolaty jar.

Everything in the way of furnishing or convenience was dusted, hoovered, bleached, scoured, polished and aired. The blue suite in the bathroom and grey suite in the cloakroom sang with hygiene and mint flavours. In the bedroom a book, closed solidly on its leather bookmark, was a nonfiction study of the English coast. Vanessa was about halfway through. Her nightdress lay invisible in its case. Her mules nested just under the bed.

As with George, I looked in cupboards, under the beds of main and guestroom. I even steeled myself to look in her formal and unstimulating wardrobe. I let down the ladder to the attic and clambered up, and gaped out of a tiny diamond-shaped window. One could see the sea from the attic. I’d never known. But otherwise it only contained water tanks and wiring, these also in significantly good condition.

I pulled out drawers and saw boring dossiers to do with house maintenance, bills and garden and shopping accounts, and similar stuff.

In the end I ran a glass of water from the tap and drank it, sitting at the dining-room table. To take the unopened wine seemed inappropriate. Even to munch a slice of meat or lettuce, or bite into a tomato, was certainly forbidden by some oblique code.

For about two hours I lingered. I didn’t, at any moment, imagine she would come back. Not after George.

I didn’t bother to try the phone. I had a feeling it would give me the engaged signal, or that bossy voice that tells one to call later, like an insolent butler from the 1920’s.

I had one strange and unworthy thought. I wondered if I should steal anything from her. Not money or jewellery, not that I noticed any, but a book, say, or a plate… something. I wasn’t sure if this impulse was from a desire for some memento, or only a wish to rescue an object randomly from the deserted property.

She would never come back. Just as George would not.

When I left, not having, or not having seen the key, I was unable to lock the French doors. As with the side gate, it couldn’t be helped.

Was I depressed? Frightened? No, nothing much. It was only rather melancholy.

As I walked back along her road I told myself she would come in soon, and make a fuss that I hadn’t turned up, and hadn’t rung her to apologise. But I knew perfectly well she wouldn’t. I’d never hear from Aunt Vanessa again. And never again from Uncle George.

Back on the Brighton esplanade I had fish and chips and a couple of beers. All around people were eating and drinking, and gazing at the churning white and turquoise-green sea. The chalk makes it green, I think somebody once said. The sky was going to a grumpy purple. It would rain soon. Or pour. Pour like silver milk on the just and the unjust together.

Irvin:

30

I have seldom seen a worse or more worthless attendance than there was tonight at the theatre. Is it for this we trod the boards in our finery, with reddened lips and darkened eyes, and sang out the words of the poet? Is it for this I stabbed to the heart with the trick dagger the delicious Mis’us Merscilla Peck, an actress of some quality, and the blood-sac disgorged, and I at last fell dead from the villain’s poison, so realistically and disgustingly? For twenty-three persons and some irritated dog, (this beast not worth one flea upon the back of my own pernicious and unfaithful hound)?

Well, so it goes. But our wages will reflect this wretched meagreness of a crowd, as does a polished spoon the dirty dish.

So then, home, and not even a dawdle with Mis’us Peck to console me.

The house as ever damp and drear, and the benighted roughness of the land outside, among the coppices and mournful as a painting I once saw of a nocturnal Ophelia, drowning herself in a leaf-falling autumn, under a flux-brown river. This penance of a view runs all the way west of north, to the Ravensburn marshes.

The dog was out and off about his business, as ever, ravishing some neighbourhood canis femina.

In my turn out I went again to the Black Sheep Inn, and had there some strands of meat in a levy of boiled water.

I must find another leman, it seems, until the fair Merscilla, who shows no mercy, (indeed her husband is the kinder to me), until, I say, she forgives me for the sparagal of tonight’s congregation. Why I am to blame,