didn’t carry all that shopping home, Ma, did you?’
Nancy didn’t know much more about Eliza’s afflictions than she had done as a girl, but she was certain that she was not allowed to lift anything heavy. Eliza waved a dismissive hand.
‘It was very busy. Crowds of miserable people, looking sick and exhausted. A woman right in front of me was coughing like a walrus.’
Nancy laughed. ‘Do walruses cough?’
Cornelius suddenly lifted his head. ‘They do. Although perhaps it’s more of a bark.’
The women smiled in astonishment. It was an unexpected glimpse of the boy he had once been, to be authoritative about walruses. Eliza covered his hand with hers.
‘My dear son,’ she murmured.
Very quietly Nancy pushed back her chair and slipped out of the kitchen.
Up in the drawing room she idly parted the curtains so she could look down into the pitch-black garden. She could see no further than the twigs poking up from the iron balustrade and these were overlaid by reflections of the room behind her. She caught an overpowering scent of summer roses and damp earth as one of the tall doors suddenly swung open and a child came in from the darkness.
It was a little girl. Water streamed from her hair.
Nancy stood transfixed. The apparition was so lonely and small. A long time seemed to pass.
‘What do you want?’ she asked at last.
The child didn’t speak. Instead she reached out her small hand. It seemed she was trying to lead Nancy outside. Although she was not afraid of her, Nancy could not help but recoil.
‘I can’t come with you.’
Nancy could see the pallor of the child’s scalp where the locks of wet hair parted. She shivered. The desolation emanating from the little thing chilled the room.
‘Tell me what you want,’ Nancy begged.
She shook her head and her small hand drew back. A sharp gust of wind stirred the heavy curtains as the girl stepped out into the night.
As soon as she was gone frustration swept over Nancy. It was deeply distressing to have seen the apparition and yet been unable to help her.
She sat down in her father’s armchair, closing her eyes to allow herself to recover. The scent of flowers faded.
Nancy feared the Uncanny much less than she had done when Mr Feather placed his hand on her head. She had borrowed Cornelius’s big dictionary to look up the terms associated with psychism, ‘clairvoyant’ and ‘telepathy’ and ‘precognition’, puzzling over the definitions set out in what she had later learned to recognise as tiny six-point type. Clairvoyant took her to ‘mentally perceiving objects or events at a distance, or concealed from sight, or in the future, attributed to certain persons’, which might account for her glimpse of the trenches long before they had been dug but still fell quite a long way short of explaining the Uncanny. ‘Communications from one mind to another’ and ‘foreknowledge’ did not illuminate much either.
There was no defining the state, she concluded, any more than there was any way of properly controlling it. It was something that happened to her, like the fits Cornelius had occasionally suffered when he was much younger. The difference was that her fits were invisible to everyone else.
Her private theory was that perhaps past and present and future time did not run in a straight line. She imagined that they streamed in curls and loops, doubling back and crossing over each other, and that there were tiny flaws in the gossamer membrane that held them apart. Through these cracks, was it not possible that glimpses of different times, shadows of people who were gone or had not yet arrived, might seep into the here and now? And equally, might not the curls and loops shift as time spooled by, causing the cracks to close again?
Some people might be more than usually sensitive to such leakages, she reasoned. It was not a lucky gift, at least not as Mr Feather had suggested. She remembered a girl at her school admired by everyone for having perfect musical pitch, but the same girl found it almost physically painful to listen to off-key playing. She would shudder and put her hands over her ears.
Such gifts were not always welcome, or comfortable to possess.
‘Nancy?’
Eliza was shaking her.
‘He’s gone upstairs to bed.’ Eliza was rubbing her hands together, her shoulders drawn close to her ears. ‘Why is it so cold in here?’
Nancy struggled to collect herself. ‘Has he? Is it?’
The corners of Eliza’s mouth turned down. Nancy knew how capable she was of kindling her mother’s irritation, but it saddened her to be made aware of it over and over again. Eliza unconditionally adored her sons but she measured her daughter against her own yardstick. Nancy must fulfil her mother’s ambitions for her, which had once been Eliza’s for herself. Eliza particularly disliked the notion that her child might be keeping something from her.
‘What are you hiding?’ she had once snapped when Nancy was much younger.
Flippantly Nancy had held out her upturned palms to show that there was nothing concealed there.
Eliza slapped them.
‘That’s enough. You are not a conjuror.’
Nancy wished she could be more the daughter Eliza wanted. She regretted the distance between them because it seemed so small, and yet was so impossible to bridge.
She took her mother’s hands now. ‘Ma?’
Eliza’s fingers were dry and hot. Nancy touched her forehead and found that it was burning too.
‘You’re not well.’
Eliza’s head drooped in defeat. She sighed, ‘Nancy, I am so tired of illness.’
Eliza let herself be led upstairs to bed. Their roles could suddenly reverse and in one second switch back again.
Once she had settled her mother under the eiderdown and listened at Cornelius’s door, Nancy wandered back through the darkened house. She was too concerned about Eliza to spare much thought for the little apparition, but she went into the drawing room and stood on the same spot. There was nothing there now and when she opened the doors overlooking the garden only cold, damp air swept in. But there was something at the back of her, like the palm of a hand moving just a hair’s breadth away from her head. She spun round, almost crying out, and searched the empty room. She walked the length of it and opened the front curtains.
A man in a long overcoat stood next to the railing topping the canal embankment. At first his face was hidden under the brim of his hat, but then he seemed to sense her watching him and looked up.
It was Lawrence Feather. She knew him at once, even though she had not set eyes on him since the day Eliza dispatched him from this room, more than eight years ago. He had stood in just the same way, motionless and intent, on the beach outside the hotel and she had looked down on him from a bay window.
A
