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

In the morning, she had tried to sell the diamond ring.

Until then, it hadn’t seemed absolutely necessary. From Lilith, Anna had taken clothes, the dress and raincoat, and also the money Lilith had brought with her in a cheap purse. Had she stolen the money, with the gin and the map, and, presumably, the car? Or was it only Anna’s money anyway, stolen originally by the servants.

Anna took a room in a small musty hotel. They gave you breakfast, unappealing English fare, burnt meats and fish and broken eggs, fried, and great slabs of bread with yellow grease spread on them. And stodgy dark brown tea.

For a couple of days Anna bought fruit in a market, and ate it at night in her room, which was, according to a notice on the wall, forbidden.

There were men, too. You found them mostly in the pubs. They bought you a drink or two, and then came a stumbling up dim stairs or even into a hotel room just like Anna’s own. They would say, “Five shillings all right?” Or even take her for a meagre supper, and that was it.

She kept thinking she must not stay in London. It was in fact a fearful place. And although she had found the river, with rusty ships rubbing their sides on its banks, it did not seem to her to be the river she had heard and read of. But there was a huge clock. It presided over the mud-flats and the warehouses. Along the concrete shore shone street-lamps. The buses were papered over with advertisements and injunctions. So many things, showing you, telling you, what to do, what not to do.

Anna knew she must find a way to leave. It had always been like this, the compulsion, the impetus, to volition, progressing or escaping.

Somehow she had saved the ring. And then she went to a shop, which was pointed out to her, and inside, in the same sort of fudge-dark she recalled when Raoul had bought it, she offered the ring up.

She felt no wrench, in doing this. She had only to wrench a little in getting it off. But she had lost weight, or attachment, it had not been impossible to slough the ring, as in the house it had.

There was an old man behind the grill. “Let me see.”

The ring was pushed under the grill. The old man abruptly malignantly laughed. “This? What do you take me for? It’s glass.”

The lizard woman in the village pub had said exactly this.

Anna was prepared.

“Can you give me anything?”

“The time of day, my dear.”

He was a Jew. She recollected how Jews were hated. She noted, conceivably, why.

He passed her back the glass diamond, chuckling, and she foresaw he would tell everyone he had contact with his colossal joke, the young slut who had come in and tried to get money on such rubbish.

After this episode, she sat on a seat under a dispirited tree. She sat there most of the day.

Three days ago she had no longer had any money to pay for the room. So she had left the hotel without settling her bill.

Now all the money was gone. And she was so hungry. Ridiculously hungry, for even this morning she had bought herself some toast and a pot of tea at a café.

Through the late afternoon she walked about. Sometimes men looked at her, and once one looked right at her, and she smiled, but then he seemed afraid and hurried on.

She went through an arid park, where the trees had metal leaves, and flowers bloomed with a parched red scent.

Children were feeding the blue pigeons.

Anna stared at this. She could taste the chunks of stale bread in her mouth. The pond gleamed, making her thirsty for gin and bitters. But also she had a curious notion, picking up a child, and licking its face, delicately. What would it taste of? It would laugh, and so would she.

There was a boat-train from some station she had heard of, (with Raoul?), and this would take her over to France. France would be better.

She needed to meet a man who was going to France.

Why was it a strange day, really? It wasn’t so strange. Even the sunset, pomegranates and peaches, and all these people staring at it. Forbidden fruit.

At last, the dark closed the sky, and lamps were lighting up as if at the touch of phantoms.

The big clock boomed. How many strokes? Was it seven?

Anna gazed down on to the iron surface of the river. She had returned to it, vainly searching for something. Items were thrown into canals and rivers.

But the hot evening made her slow. She leaned on the wall above the water, and she could smell food from some restaurant, and all at once she didn’t want it so much. It wasn’t really so important, to eat. Or to do anything.

Could it be, she wondered, if London was after all the last of the cities, her destination, its parched vistas so redolent of terminus, like a station itself, where trains would enter, but from which no passengers went away.

The man stood under the lamp, lighting a cigarette.

He was tall, slimly built, well-dressed. His hat was tilted a little, and his hair was very fair. He was not like Raoul.

She knew he had been looking at her, almost intently, and now, seeing her look up in turn, he walked without haste across the pavement.

“Good evening. Did you see the sunset?”

“Oh… yes.”

“It was very beautiful.”

“Yes.”

He smiled. “I think you’re a foreigner, like myself.” Had he said this? Raoul had once said this, but the man was not like Raoul.

“Are you?” she asked.

“A foreigner? To London, yes.” He took out a packet of cigarettes and offered them to her. When she accepted one, he lit it for her. And as he leaned closer, she saw, under his right eye, a small birthmark, only the faintest of colours, only the size of an English farthing.

Her heart beat once, shaking her.