Sleep, Pale Sister

58

When he had gone, I paced the hall in a delirium of fury. Oh, I had been prettily duped; I saw it all now. Everything he had said about my art…the hours spent in my house, drinking my brandy, looking at my wife…all that time he’d been waiting for the moment to trip me, laughing behind his hands at my bumbling, ignorant kindness. Damn him! In the heat of my fury I could almost have confessed the whole sorry affair to the police for the satisfaction of seeing him hang…But I would have my revenge; not now, when I had to remain calm, when I had to seem in control if I was to deal with the police. But I would.

I made my way to my room and a little chloral diluted in brandy sank my rage to the sea-bed: numbness came quickly and I was able to sit in my winged armchair, forcing my trembling hands to be still, and wait.

But the night was full of sounds: here the sharp crack of a log in the hearth, there the whisper of bubbles in the gas-jet, so like the light uneven breathing of a sleeping child…I sat close to the fire and listened, and it seemed to me that behind the normal creakings and whisperings of an old house in winter I could hear something else, a sequence of sounds which finally resolved themselves in my torpid brain as the sounds of someone moving quietly from room to room around me. At first I dismissed it (the caress of a woman’s skirts against the silk wallpaper) because it was impossible for anyone to have entered the house without a key and I had locked the door as soon as Harper left (the padding of light feet on the thick pile of the carpet, the creaking of a leather armchair as she rested there awhile). I poured myself another glass of brandy-and-chloral (a tiny sound of china from the parlour as she tasted the cake-she always had an especial liking for chocolate cake).

Suddenly I could bear it no longer. I leaped to my feet, throwing the door open, reflecting a long ladder of light from my room into the passageway. No-one. The parlour door was ajar-had I left it that way? I couldn’t remember. Compelled by a bleak desire far stronger than fear, I pushed it, allowing it to swing gently open. For a moment I saw her: a girl of leaves with her leaf-cat in her arms, their eyes like mirrors reflecting me, my face pinprick-small in the wells of their pupils…then nothing. Nothing but the reflection of a weeping-willow etched in white against the darkness of a window.

There was no girl. There had never been a girl. I quickly sca

I froze.

Under the tree, a small triangle of torn wrapping-paper lay on the carpet. Just one. Stupidly, I tried to think where it could have come from. Taking two clumsy steps forward I saw that the topmost present-the peach silk wrap-had slipped from the pile and fallen to one side. Automatically, I bent to straighten it and I saw that the string had been cut and the parcel loosened so that folds of silk and lace showed through the stiff brown wrapping.

The sense of what I had seen refused to co

From my abyss, I realized that I was laughing.

59

It’s amazing, isn’t it, how money disappears? I paid my debts, the ones I could not delay paying, though by no means the whole, and for a few days I began to define the style of living to which I thought I might like to become accustomed. I ate well, drank only the best. As for women, there were more than I could clearly remember, all beauties, all delightfully eager to see the colour of dear Henry’s money. Don’t think I wasn’t grateful to him: I made sure I drank to his health every time I opened a new bottle, and when Beggar Maid ran at Newmarket I made sure I put ten pounds on her-I won too, at fifteen to one. It seemed as if I couldn’t lose at anything.

Not that I didn’t keep a close watch on events from my little hotbed of debauchery. Effie Chester’s disappearance was reported in The Times with the possibility of foul play mentioned-it seemed that she had set off on the morning of Christmas Eve to visit her mother in Cranbourn Alley and had never arrived. The lady was ‘of frail and nervous disposition’ and police were concerned for her safety. I reckoned Henry had played his part well enough; the paper described him as ‘distraught’. But he was unstable, I knew that: chloral and religion in equal quantities had upset the equilibrium of his free will and I guessed that, after the first few weeks of subterfuge, he would very likely sink into a kind of stupid despondency and imagine all kinds of retribution to be heading his way.

I felt that there was a chance of his eventually giving himself in to the police in an ecstasy of remorse-at which time, of course, there would be no more tarts for poor Jack. I supposed that Fa

Fa

It must have been…let me see…about 30 December. Henry had had nearly a week to deal with his various affairs and I had almost run out of money. So I ambled over to his house and asked to see him. The housekeeper looked down her nose and told me Mr Chester wasn’t at home. Not at home to me, most likely, I thought, and told her I would wait. Well, she ushered me into the parlour and I waited. After a while I grew restless and began to look around: the parlour was still decorated for Christmas and under the tree were a number of parcels, still waiting to be unwrapped by a girl who would never come home. A poignant touch, that, I thought appreciatively-the police would have liked it. Additionally, Henry had covered all the paintings on the wall with dust-covers: the effect was disturbing and I wondered why he had done it. I idled in the parlour for nearly two hours until I realized that the housekeeper was right: Mr Chester wasn’t at home.