At around the time Lucy was drinking her wine and thinking about Alraune, and Edmund was reviewing his life with such satisfaction, a sharp and incisive mind was remembering a very particular childhood fear.
It was a fear that still sometimes clawed its way to the surface, even after so many years and even when a degree of prosperity had been doggedly achieved. Even today, the fear that had ruled the life of a lonely child and that night after night had filled up a house had not completely faded.
The house had been in Pedlar’s Yard, once the site of an East London street market, once a busy little world of its own. The original cobbles were still discernible in places, but the market had been abandoned a century and a half earlier, and the houses and the surrounding areas were sinking into decay. No. 16 was squeezed between two larger buildings whose frontages both jutted out in front of it, so that it was always dark inside and there was a squashed-up feeling.
On some nights in that house it was necessary to hide, without always understanding why. But as the years went by, understanding gradually unfurled, and then it was necessary to be sly about the hiding places, changing them, sometimes doubling back to earlier hiding places, because if you were found on the nights when fear filled up the rooms – the nights when he stormed through the house – terrible things could happen.
None of it must ever be talked of. That had been one of the earliest lessons to be learned. ‘Tell a living soul what I do in here and I’ll break your fingers, one by one.’ And then the thin angry face with its cold eyes suddenly coming closer, and the soft voice whispering its threats. ‘And if you do tell, I’ll know. Remember that. If you tell, I’ll find out.’
On those nights not my pleas, not mother’s frightened crying – nothing – ever stopped him. She covered up the bruises and the marks and she never talked about the other wounds he inflicted on her in their bed, and I never talked about it either. She sought refuge in the tales she had stored away about the past; they were her armour, those tales, and they became my armour as well because she pulled me into the tales with her, and once inside we were both safe.
Safe.
But have I ever really been safe since those years? Am I really safe now?
CHAPTER TWO
Lucy supposed that she would get to hear the result of Trixie Smith’s researches eventually. Probably Aunt Deb would phone, which would be nice, because she could tell a good tale, dear old Deb, and Lucy would enjoy hearing all about the delvings into the squirrelled-away memorabilia. (Would the delvings turn up anything about Alraune…?)
But at the moment she was not thinking about Alraune and she was not thinking about her disreputable grandmamma; she was concentrating on Quondam’s presentation for the silent horror films.
There were going to be three films in the package. As well as The Devil’s Sonata there was a version of Du Maurier’s Trilby which Quondam had recently picked up somewhere, and also a very early edition of The Bells from 1913.