Chapter Ten
A fine
snowfall was beginning in the Mayfair streets. Falling on last
night’s frost, it was causing London’s heart to go into its usual
palpitations. Already a taxi had skidded into the back of a bus,
and a truck was slewed at forty-five degrees across Chesterfield
Hill. No one was hurt. There were just a lot of muted British
expostulations, and only the cabbies were rude enough to sound
their horns in the ensuing jams. Laurie walked through the chaos,
barely seeing. He felt like his own ghost. He could hardly claim,
after two weeks away, to have gained a new perspective on this
world, but still it struck him deeply—the sameness, the infinite
difference. The crowds on the pavement: much the same mix of faces
and races, most of them subtly transformed, lit up, padded out,
made sleek by good diet, by the leisure to be out here in the
daylight engaged in their Christmas shopping. This had been
Laurie’s world twelve months ago.
He
remembered that his biggest concern then had been Clara’s desire
for a kitten, and his own half-child, half-adult plots to ransom
one of the pedigreed darlings from its cage in Harrods’ pet store
and plan out a life for it on the Mayfair upper floor, where it
would never run afoul of Sir William’s temper or his mother’s
allergies. The least of his problems had been affording it. His
pocket money would have covered the whole litter. Now he was, he
supposed, an independent man. He had a job and a lover and little
else—although both job and lover felt so tenuous to him on the back
of lonely nights and increasing forgetfulness about food that he
could scarcely believe in even them.
The
crowds that had once excited and scared him by their rich density
were now simply obstacles. Once he had drifted in them, let them
carry him along, but more often than not, as he struggled up the
pavements today, the occasional knock or shouldering contact felt
to him hostile, ready and willing to hurt. The same buzz of
commerce was going on—but here, Laurie saw for the first time, the
shopkeepers plied their trade from caskets of jewels, magical
caverns that bore little semblance to East Hill’s dingy grocery
stores and charity shops. He found himself pausing outside windows
he had sailed past, oblivious, all his life, putting a hand to
their frames to steady himself and try to breathe. Every commodity
he’d just begun to learn to fight for was spread out in wild
abundance. Lights blazed. Food halls touted free samples of their
delicacies on trestles outside the shops. Wide-flung welcoming
doors spewed thousands of pounds’ worth of heat every second into
the street.
No one
from Sasha’s world was to be seen. In a way, Laurie couldn’t
understand it. Starving men and women should overwhelm this place,
surely—sweep the trestles clear of fresh-baked marzipan slices,
fill rucksacks and plastic bags. Stand beneath the hot-air ducts in
blessed relief from the cold. He saw a woman take one bite from a
mince pie, make a face of amused disgust, and drop the rest into
the gutter.
His head
spun. No, the underworld people could not come here. After one week
away, Laurie could barely come here himself. No police were needed
to man the barricades. No chance of revolution in London today. No
tiny upper class to tear down—instead, a huge majority of
middle-class souls, some good, some bad, most here spending
hard-earned money, some living on the wages of sin. All of them
with just enough to have forgotten or to be unable to imagine how
it felt to have nothing at all.
Charity
workers shook tins and were not ignored. That kind of giving came
easy enough, Laurie knew. Palatable. At a remove. But someone like
Gyorgy, with his stolen shopping trolley full of rags, could not
push his way up these pavements and into this world’s golden heart.
Probably no one would stop him. But empty belly, unwashed skin
quailed and grew faint in the face of it. After a few weeks, you
would not even try.
He
turned off Avery Row and into the quiet residential streets that
led to his own. Once out of the crowd, he thought he’d be able to
catch his breath, but the sense of mild suffocation stayed with
him, as well as a headache and a needling pain in his stomach. He
tried to think when he had last eaten. He still had his array of
economical and nourishing foodstuffs in the flat, had even
replenished them yesterday in Sasha’s recommended grocery store,
where Sasha’s friendly shopkeeper had cut him a deal on his apples.
What had been missing was the prompt of appetite. Without it, the
boxes and bags were just abstracts. He had put them neatly away and
forgotten them. He wasn’t hungry now, though he knew he should have
been.
Sasha had said, “I’ll come back to
you. Can you trust me?” And Laurie had
tried. But Sasha had come to him from nowhere, and the nowhere that
had swallowed him allowed Laurie no handholds, not even the
possibility of imagining where he had gone.
The
grand facade of Sir William’s mansion rose up before him. Laurie
had to stop for a minute, cold sweat crawling in his armpits. He
clutched at the wrought-iron railings until the wash of vertigo
passed. He could, he knew, find the key beneath the garage door and
slip into the house through his old escape route. He could perhaps
never encounter any of the denizens of this world, who had become
like cardboard cutouts in his head: his father’s misshapen and
bearlike, his mother’s made of tissue and like a doll’s.
Clara’s…
No. Hers
was real, three-dimensional. Flesh lit from within by unmarred
spirit. He had to see her. He owed her. And he would walk through
the front door of his own house.
To his
surprise, it was open. Just a crack, as if company was expected,
and beyond it, through the tinted glass of the porch, he could see
signs of activity, human figures passing back and forth.
Perhaps his mother was having one of her interminable
pre-Christmas sherry parties. Laurie found himself oddly thrown—not
at the thought of all those tipsy Mayfair ladies, although that had
been bad enough, determined as they always seemed to be to molest
him as he tried to hand around the bloody sherry, diamond-loaded
fingers ruffling his hair, playfully patting his backside.
“Oh, Marielle! Isn’t he handsome? Isn’t he
getting big?”
Laurie
repressed a snort of laughter and looked at the unlatched door.
Somehow, if it was open to him, he could not just walk in. Puzzled
at himself, he rang the bell.
Mrs.
Gibson appeared almost immediately, her portly frame coalescing at
an uncharacteristic trot through the glass. Laurie smiled in
relief. Charlie had been right; she wouldn’t go. She pulled the
porch door wide, then came to a halt at the sight of him. She said
hoarsely, “Master Laurie. She isn’t with you, is she? Oh, God. She
isn’t with you…”
Laurie
pushed the main door open and stepped into the porch. He caught
Gibson’s elbow and guided her collapse onto the marble bench. He
crouched before her and, when she broke into ragged sobs, put out
his arms and held her as she had so often held him. “Gibson.
Gibson, who isn’t? What’s the matter?” Fear beginning a slow slide
through him, Laurie patted her shoulders and head, seeing with
indefinable disturbance that her gray-streaked hair, normally
impeccably brushed back into its bun, was tousled and escaping in
strands. “Who isn’t with me?”
“Clara. It’s Clara. She’s missing.”
Laurie
sat back on his heels. Gibson, after a moment, raised her swollen
eyes to him. She looked terrible, as if she had been crying for
days. He dug in his pocket and found a tissue from the Empire’s
makeup table, slightly smeared but usable. “Here,” he said, handing
it to her. Her words were clear enough, he supposed, but they
wouldn’t seem to go in. “What do you mean?”
“We tried to get in touch with you, but your mobile was off.”
Shakily Gibson blew her nose. “Oh, Laurie. She was upset when you
left. We thought maybe…we thought maybe she’d gone to you, or you’d
come and got her. That was our last hope.”
Last hope. Laurie frowned. At the
same time, he could feel an incredulous smile trying to start. Poor
Gibson. She did love them, didn’t she? Him and Clara both. All
this, because the little bugger had taken a huff and hidden herself
somewhere. It wouldn’t be the first time. And she couldn’t half
hold out. It had been hours when she’d last disappeared, the whole
house in an uproar. Well, it was tough. Time was up. Laurie knew
all her hiding places: attics, wardrobes, even a disused bathroom
where the side panel of the bath came off, a frequent lair. He
pressed a kiss to Mrs. Gibson’s wet cheek. “It’s okay,” he said,
getting to his feet. “She’ll just be upstairs somewhere. I’ll flush
her out.”
He was halfway up the first flight of stairs when her voice
tugged him back. In his run across the hallway—ten long strides
across the black-and-white marble from porch to polished-oak newel
post, time enough to reflect that this house was not just a
different world but a separate fucking universe from the East Hill
flat—he had seen strange things, but not taken them in. Faces he
did not know. And he had heard—weirdly, it brought to mind the
opening scenes of TV shows like CSI, when the camera was panning in,
the atmosphere mic open—an electrical chatter, hissing, and
truncated static. He stopped on the stairs, not yet
turning.
“Laurie, love,” Mrs. Gibson called. There was so much pain in
her voice that tears stung Laurie’s eyes, though he still could not
grasp at the problem. “She’s been gone for three days.”
The
crackling was the sound of police radios. Returning down the
stairs, Laurie could see one of them, attached to the shoulder of a
grave-looking young woman police constable waiting in the hallway
with an older man behind her. The WPC put out a hand to him, as if
he needed steadying, and Laurie automatically took it. She said,