she’s ill.’
She felt a stab of anxiety. ‘Ill? Has the earache…?’
‘She’s fine, since you’re so worried. They need their routine, Helen. Except when it suits you.’
‘I told you. I had to work. Like you do, you know? When you get a late call?’
‘Oh, sure, old letters and bits of paper. What does your wife do, Mr Kovacs? Oh, she’s got a BA in old shopping lists.’ There was a moment’s silence, then he added. ‘And a PhD in banging the boss.’
Not that again. ‘I’m working,’ she said. ‘Are the kids okay? That’s all I wanted to know.’
‘I told you. They’re fine.’
‘Can I speak to Hannah?’
‘It’s a bad line. She won’t be able to hear you.’
‘I’ll be home by nine. I’ll phone when–’
‘She’ll be in bed.’ His voice was cold.
‘I know. I’d just like to say–’
‘I’ll tell her you called.’ He hung up.
She felt depressed after the call. She and Daniel couldn’t even have a civil conversation about the children. At least it looked as though she wouldn’t have to take time off to go to the doctor’s with Hannah. She wouldn’t have to cancel her meeting with Faith.
She looked at the letters spread out on the desk in front of her, and at the diary. She was about to make a decision. She couldn’t finish reading these here. She’d assumed there would be some kind of copying facilities–the word ‘library’ had conjured up a different image from the one that had confronted her. But no one knew the letters and diary were here, so no one would miss them. She could slip them into her bag and take them away to study at her leisure. It would be okay–she was a bona fide scholar, and she could quietly return them when she’d finished with them. No harm done.
And that was when she heard the sound. It was–it had been–the soft click of the door. ‘Nick?’ she said. There was no response. She paused with the notebook closed over her finger. ‘Hello?’ she said.
Silence whispered back. And in the silence…Was she imagining it?–the faintest sound of breathing, of something moving through the darkness like silk. She stood up, suddenly uneasy. ‘Who’s there?’ She picked up the lamp to lift it higher, to expand the area of light, but the cord pulled tight. She put it down on the desk and moved slowly back down the aisle, the high shelves looming shadows in the darkness.
Now her imagination was playing tricks, making movements in the dark corners of the room, making soft sounds like footsteps behind her. She spun round, looking back along the aisle to the pool of light that marked the place where she had been working. ‘Hello?’ she said again.
The aisle was empty, running back into the shadows. But she’d heard…
Then there was someone behind her and before she could move something snaked round her neck and pulled tight. Her breath was cut off and her hands clawed futilely at the thing that bit deep into her flesh, feeling the slipperiness of blood under her fingers. Blood? My blood? And her legs were starting to tremble as she twisted and struggled for air and there was no one behind her as her flailing arms hit out and the darkness was darker and…
And the circle of light from the desk lamp crept up the wall, illuminating the shelves, up and up until the balance mechanism caught, and the light froze, fixed upwards at the stained and ornate ceiling where a plaster cherub, half its face gone, dispensed grapes from fingerless hands and the stains darkened as the rain penetrated and dripped on to the papers spread out below.
When Faith was a child, she thought that she lived in a forest. Her grandfather’s house, where she spent her childhood, was surrounded by trees, beech and sycamore and chestnut, their heavy leaves shielding it in summer and their branches standing like guardians when the winter stripped them bare. The garden was a playground of green tunnels and damp leaf mould where the sun would sometimes break through and dapple the ground with sudden colour–the vivid green of a leaf, the scarlet of a berry.
The house itself was a place of dark corridors and closed-up rooms, cold and rather comfortless. But she could remember the evenings she spent with her grandfather when he read to her from his book of fairy tales with pictures of witches and goblins, dark paths and mysterious houses in forest glades. And he would tell her stories about his own childhood in a house built deep in a forest, somewhere far away.
And she could remember the way his face would change sometimes as he talked. His voice would falter and then fall silent, and he would pat her hand absently and say, ‘That is enough, little one.’ He would go to his study and the door would close behind him with the finality of silence…
Faith woke suddenly, sitting up in bed, the quilt that had tangled round her as she slept sliding on to the floor. For a moment she didn’t know where she was, then the confusion cleared. She was in her house in Glossop, where she had lived for just a month. It was still dark. She could see the square of the skylight above her, and the silhouettes of the bedroom furniture emerging from the gloom. She switched on the lamp, flooding the room with warmth and colour. Dreams of her childhood faded from her mind.
Her bedroom was an attic, with slanting walls and odd nooks and corners. It was the first room she’d decorated once she’d bought the house, stripping off the dingy wallpaper and painting everything white, adding colour with throws and blinds so that even on this dark winter morning, the rain beating on the skylight above her head, the room looked warm and welcoming.
She went down the winding staircase to the bathroom. Her head felt muzzy with sleep as she stood under the shower, so she turned the temperature down and woke herself up with a blast of cold water. She wrapped herself in a towel, shivering as she went quickly back up the stairs. A spatter of rain blew across the window.
It was the start of her second week in her new job at the Centre for European Studies at the University of Manchester. She had recently been appointed as a senior research assistant to the director, the eminent historian and political philosopher Antoni Yevanov. It had been a hotly contested post that she had won after a gruelling three-day interview. She knew that a lot of people were surprised when she was appointed–they thought that at thirty-two, she was too young, that she didn’t yet have the experience–and the professional knives were out.
She dried her hair. It had grown over the summer, and it hung heavy and dark to her shoulders, so she pulled it off her face and secured it with a clip. She hesitated as she tried to decide what to wear. The day was going to be bitty–she had a meeting first thing, she had an article to complete for an academic journal about the role of statistical analysis in historical research, and there was a departmental meeting at four, which would be the first she had attended at the Centre. She knew the importance of first impressions.
After a moment’s thought, she chose a cream skirt and a tailored jacket. She’d be walking a lot today–the corridors of the Centre, the campus–so she opted for shoes with a low heel. She was tall enough to get away with it.
It seemed strange to be back in Manchester. Faith had spent her childhood in the city, brought up by her
