getting paranoid,’ she told herself, her voice thin and childlike in the empty spaces of the cold church; she shocked herself, for she had not realized that she had spoken aloud. ‘Stop it, stop it.’
The thoughts spurted through her mind – fragmented and disjointed. The noise of the wings grew louder until it obliterated all other sounds and swamped her ability to think. The thrumming was so loud that Sally hardly felt like Sally: she was merely the sound of the wings. She drowned in the sound, as if in the black mud of the estuary.
‘No. No. Leave me alone.’
The thrumming grew even louder. It was dark. She could no longer breathe. She heard a great crack, so loud that for a moment it dominated the thrumming of the wings. Cold air swirled around her.
‘That’s quite enough.’ The voice was furious and male. ‘This must stop at once.’
Sally opened her eyes and turned her head. Through her tears she saw Michael’s godfather, David Byfield, stalking down the aisle towards her.
‘Do but extract from the corpulency of bodies, or resolve things beyond their first matter, and you discover the habitation of Angels …’
Religio Medici, I, 35
‘Lucy’s as good as gold with me.’ Angel rinsed the soap from the back of Lucy’s neck. ‘Aren’t you, poppet?’
Lucy did not reply. She looked very young and small in the bath, her body partly obscured by a shifting mound of foam. She was staring at a blue plastic boat containing two yellow ducks; the boat bobbed up and down in the triangular harbour created by her legs. Her wet hair, plastered to her skull, was as black as polished ebony.
‘It’s the first of December today,’ Angel went on, briskly sponging Lucy’s back. ‘Did you know, if you say “White rabbits” on the first of the month and make a silent wish, then the wish will come true? Well, that’s what some people say.’
Eddie thought that Lucy’s lips might have trembled, and that perhaps she was saying ‘White Rabbits’ to herself and making a wish. I want Mummy. She had had very little to eat for over thirty-six hours and this was beginning to show in her appearance. Children, Eddie had noticed, reacted very quickly to such changes. Now it was Sunday morning, and Lucy’s shoulders looked bonier than they had done on Friday evening, and her stomach was flat. She was still listless from the medication, and perhaps from the shock, too, otherwise Angel would not have risked taking her out of the soundproofed basement to give her a bath.
(This had been Angel’s rule since the incident with Suki, a sly girl who acted as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth until Angel went out to fetch a towel, leaving her alone with Eddie: as soon as the door closed, Suki had bitten Eddie’s hand and screamed like a train. After that, Angel gave their little visitors regular doses of Phenergan syrup, which kept them nicely drowsy. If a visitor became seriously upset, Angel quietened her with a dose of diazepam, originally prescribed for Eddie’s mother.)
‘There’s a good girl. Stand up now and Angel will dry you.’ With Angel’s help, Lucy struggled to her feet. Water and foam dripped down her body. Eddie stared at the pink, glistening skin and the cleft between her legs.
‘Uncle Eddie will pass the towel.’
He hurried to obey. There had been an unmistakable note of irritation in Angel’s voice, perhaps brought on by tiredness. He noticed dark smudges under her eyes. He knew she had gone out the previous evening and had not returned until well after midnight. Eddie had tried the door to the basement while she was out, only to find that it was locked.
Angel wrapped the large pink towel, warm from the radiator, around Lucy’s body, lifted her out of the bath and sat her on her knee. Eddie thought they made a beautiful picture, a Pre-Raphaelite Virgin and child: Angel in her long white robe, her shining hair flowing free; and Lucy small, thin and sexless, swaddled in the towel, sitting on Angel’s lap and enclosed by her arms. He turned away. His head hurt this morning, and his throat was dry.
The clothes they had bought for Lucy were waiting on the chair. Among them was a dark-green dress from Laura Ashley, with a white lace collar, a smocked front and ties at each side designed to form a bow at the back. Angel liked her girls to look properly feminine. Boys were boys, she once told Eddie, girls were girls, and it was both stupid and unnatural to pretend otherwise.
‘Perhaps Lucy would like to play a game with me when she’s dressed,’ Eddie suggested.
The girl glanced at him, and a frown wrinkled her forehead.
‘She might like to see the you-know-what.’
‘The what?’ Angel said.
Eddie shielded his mouth with his hand, leaned towards her and whispered, ‘The conjuring set.’
He had bought it yesterday morning and he was longing to see Lucy’s reaction: all children liked presents, and often they showed their gratitude in delightful ways.
Angel rubbed Lucy’s hair gently. ‘Another day, I think. Lucy’s tired. Aren’t you, my pet?’
Lucy looked up at her, blinking rapidly as her eyes slid in and out of focus. ‘I want to go home. I want Mummy. I –’
‘Mummy and Daddy had to go away. Not for long. I told you, they asked me to look after you.’
The frown deepened. For Lucy, Eddie guessed, Angel’s certainty was the only fixed point among the confusion and the anxiety.
‘Now, now, poppet. Let’s see a nice big smile. We don’t like children who live on Sulky Street, do we?’
‘Perhaps if we played a game, it would take Lucy’s mind off things.’ Eddie removed his glasses and polished the lenses with the corner of a towel. ‘It would be a distraction.’
‘No.’ Angel picked up the little vest. ‘Lucy’s not well enough for that at present. When we’ve finished in here, I’m going to make her a nice drink and sit her on my knee and read a nice book to her.’
To his horror, Eddie felt tears filling his eyes. It was so unfair. ‘But with the others, we always –’
Angel coughed, stopping him in mid-sentence. It was one of her rules that they should never let a girl know that there had been others. But when Eddie looked at her he was surprised to see that she was smiling.
‘Lucy isn’t like the others,’ she said, her eyes meeting Eddie’s. ‘We understand each other, she and I.’ Her lips brushed the top of Lucy’s head. ‘Don’t we, my poppet?’
What about me?
Eddie held his tongue. A moment later, Angel asked him to go down and warm some milk and turn up the heating. He went downstairs, the jealousy churning angrily and impotently inside him as pointlessly as an engine in neutral revving into the red. The two of them made such a beautiful picture, he accepted that, the Virgin and child, beautiful and hurtful.
He altered the thermostat for the central heating and put the milk on the stove. His headache was worsening. He stared into the pan, at the shifting disc of white, and felt his eyes slipping
