Killing Violets, Tanith Lee [the two towers ebook .TXT] 📗

offered to marry me. But he would have lost everything, and I didn’t want to. He would have adopted the boy, but he’s in the cemetery. Only three months old. Not even a person.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“No, you are not. People say these things. It’s nothing to you. And I suppose when the professor is dead you’ll expect some money.”

Anna had not thought of this. A flickering passed over her mind and stomach, like faint lightning.

“He has nothing,” announced the woman damningly. “The house will go to the government. I shall work in my sister’s husband’s restaurant, in Bucharest. A long journey. And I hate trains.”

They went into the house, which now felt impermanent as a structure formed from pasteboard.

There was the vaguest medical smell, as if something had been swabbed with ether. The brown air was filled with slender lit columns of dust.

Upstairs, Anna found the door of the bedroom ajar. She had seen into it once or twice, sent to fetch something by the professor. It was a big room, but with a large fireplace, the bed canopied, and there were a massive chest and a wardrobe, bookcases, and so on, so that all the space had been claustrophobically filled. There were paintings on the walls, too, dull and sepia, like the rest, hunts and battles, and one of a depressed girl brooding over a letter, clearly marked, in French, His last words to her.

The professor lay propped up on pillows. Beside him a draped table massed with little bottles, spoons, a glass. A fly buzzed against the shutter. Anna wanted to go and let it out, but the man’s old grey lids groped up and he saw her.

“You’re here,” he said.

Anna realised drearily that she must now sit down in the chair by the bed. She did not know why he had wanted her presence, and yet she dreaded a long vigil, perhaps confessions of some sort he could not reveal to anyone else.

Anna sat in the chair. Was he dying? Did he know?

“She brought a priest,” he said, showing he did. “But I sent him away. No good to me.” Then he struggled forward and to her amorphous horror, caught her hand. “Anna, Anna – I needed you so badly. Only you.” A cold wash passed over her skin. What did he want? Oh God, please let it not be he had fallen in love with her. There had been that other time, when she was only fifteen, and having to lie in those arms to comfort, until death came and she was able to pull free… “Anna, listen.”

“Yes… what is it?”

“My book…”

She found she was breathing after all. “Your book.”

“Take all the pages, Anna, and throw them over a bridge into the canal. Don’t miss any.”

“The canal.”

“Yes. Oh, someone may find one or two. That doesn’t matter. They’ll be ruined quickly, the canal’s so dirty.”

She thought how he had worked endlessly, diligently, all the typing, the re-typing, the swathes of pages added.

“If it’s what you want.”

“Yes, yes. I shouldn’t have presumed. If there had been time – but not like this. No one must see.”

It was as if he had written something scurrilous or terrible, which might bring down the state.

“But when you’re well again,” she said, carefully.

“I’m done for,” he said, with all the tragedy of a young hero dying in the arms of his lover or most faithful friend. He added, as if to confirm her notion, “The rest is silence.”

And then, extraordinarily, she thought he had died on that perfect cue. His head fell back, and his mouth opened as his eyes shut.

She got up and ran to the window, and flung aside the shutter and undid the catch, and the fly flew out like his Roman soul.

But downstairs the fat woman was standing with a doctor, pompous in a black coat, and when Anna said she believed the professor had died, the doctor stared at her with sceptical scorn, since only a doctor was able to recognise a death.

In fact, in this instance, he was correct, but by then Anna had gathered up all the manuscript from the typing room. It was remarkably heavy, and she tied the bulging bundle with string, as if for a publisher.

As she came out of the room, she heard the doctor and the professor talking in low elderly voices along the corridor. This jolted her, but she didn’t go to see. She carried the manuscript down and out of the house, and walked directly to the canal.

Although it was indeed filthy, under a blue sky the water was like cracked sapphire, and children were sailing small boats. She had to find another bridge, not to sink them. Here she heaved the manuscript over, and a woman in a garden on the farther bank glared at her suspiciously. She thinks it’s my stillborn baby wrapped in newspaper.

Anna read of the professor’s death in just such a journal two days later. It was a patronising and miniature mention. She did not go back to the house and had no further communication from it. He had not paid her on her last two or three visits; now she had no employment at all.

But she ate very little, smoked cigarettes only as a luxury, and had already put by a small sum for stockings and the rent.

Every so often she had gone back to the café near the public gardens where the young man had come in and walked over to her table, the young man with the warrior’s stain of birthmark. She didn’t think she did this for any particular reason. It was a café she frequented from time to time, on the days she did not go to the professor’s house.

Now she would not be going to the professor’s house, presumably, ever again, Anna walked to the café every day, although at different times. She would drink coffee and scan the journals for innocuous work, typing, or the walking of rich people’s pet dogs, posing even for