LITMIR.BIZ

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so perfect as to be almost repellent. She might have been wearing a porcelain mask. Only her eyes were mobile and alive – and they darted back and forth as if looking for somewhere to hide. Ossian felt something irresistibly needy in that glance, something lost and far from home. He wanted to rush and assure her that in him, at least, she had one true friend in the world.

      “Any murders yet?” he asked lightly, indicating the book.

      “Three and counting,” Sue smiled, marking her page with a dog-ear. “Though the first looks like it may be accidental. You’ve read it?”

      “A long time ago.”

      “Oh good!” she smiled, and made room for him on the sofa. “Now, tell me who to suspect.”

      Ossian shook his head. “All a blur. It was ages back, like I said.”

      “At least promise me it isn’t Sergeant Rosie O’Shea,” Sue pouted. “I’ve taken a real liking to her. How does she put up with that pig of a boss?”

      “O’Shea?” Ossian rummaged for the name. “Oh yes, the Irish sergeant. No, she came back in Legal Tender, so you’re probably safe.”

      “Not another Inspector Gordius fan!” said Colin, joining them.

      “My brother has no interest in fiction,” explained Sue.

      Colin acknowledged this with a shrug. “Who needs the extra confusion? Real life’s weird enough already.”

      “But that’s just where you’re missing out,” objected Sue. “With books you can force the universe to make sense. Inspector Gordius always gets his man.”

      “Well, I’m jealous. For me there’s no escape from reality. Is it any wonder my hands are shaking?”

      Sue looked at her watch. “Never mind, you’ll be able to get a drink soon,” she smiled.

      “Yes, people always ask about those,” Catherine was saying, as the party turned to a less mythological wall, where in a line above the piano three small frames were overrun with leaf and bush – souvenirs from the Purdeys’ previous visit. “Aren’t they lovely? Why, thank you. I can never decide which I admire more – the technical virtuosity or Jack’s inspired mangling of his commission. He was asked to paint three views of the house and wilfully chose to misunderstand, the impossible man.”

      “I can’t make out the house at all,” said one of the guests, peering into the watercolour foliage. “In fact, this one’s very much what I see from my room—”

      “That’s the joke, though! These are views that the house has, not views that we have of the house. You see that floating dab of white down there? That’s me, apparently. Looking no more significant than a petal.”

      “Ephemerality then,” observed the guest, “is the theme of this sequence?”

      “Or, in a different way, endurance,” Catherine agreed. “How much these four walls must have witnessed! Yet here they still are, basking comfortably while we scurry around on our little errands. That’s what Jack was trying to say, wasn’t it, Jack?”

      “Oh, I’m the last person to ask,” said Jack, rather pompously. “Once the paint dries I disown it. I set it adrift to sink or swim.”

      “Oh, it swims, it swims!”

      “Certainly it does,” said Mr Frazer, on a rare visit from his study. Even in his own house he wore a suit and tie, and his bald forehead glowed with summer heat. “Do you know Gluck’s work at all?”

      Colin took Ossian’s elbow and drew him aside to ask conspiratorially: “Fancy dodging out to the King’s Head later? You could pass for eighteen, easy.”

      “He’s not luring you to the pub already, is he?” asked Sue, whose hearing was excellent. She rose from the sofa and drifted like a mist to stand behind them.

      “Ossian and I are going to relive past times, aren’t we, Ossian? We’ve a lot of catching up to do. Don’t suppose you want to come?”

      “I’d be too embarrassed, the way you drool over that barmaid.”

      Colin shot her an unpleasant look. “What did I say, Ossian? A fantasy world.”

      “Now, children,” said Catherine cheerfully, choosing to notice Colin’s tone. “They’re terribly fond of each other really,” she explained to the guests.

      “We enjoy arguing,” agreed Sue vigorously. “It’s good for the circulation.”

      “But it’s such a waste of time, darling.”

      “Time’s what we have plenty of,” said Sue, taking a pastry from the tray. Ossian didn’t see her eat it, but when he looked a little later it was gone and her lips were innocent of crumbs.

      Ossian was restless. He moved to the French window and stepped on to the terrace beyond. At once he was ambushed by the heat. He waded through it, hugging the wall where the sun had stencilled a stiletto of shade. A brick arch let him into the kitchen yard, where the house’s grandeur lapsed into a random shabbiness, messed with bins and sheds.

      In this large house solitude was strangely hard to find and for a while he cherished the abrupt leeward silence. A windowless height of red brick leaned out against the sky to shelter him and shrank the house guests’ chatter to a querulous hum. Through the frame of the arch, the flowerbeds and lawns sloped down and out of sight. He took a breath and held it, imagined he could hold the moment too. He felt, for that precarious instant, quite content.

      Then the ghosts came for him.

      He smelt them, first of all. First came the scent of freshly-dug earth, the rich steam of black earth newly turned. Out in the garden he heard the slice of a bright clean blade, soil angled out by a booted heel. Instinctively, he grasped his neck and at once the earth smell became stronger, colder, a memorial fugue of growth and decay.

      “Not again!” he murmured. “Can’t you leave me alone?”

      Into that empty space they streamed. From jarred doors, unlatched windows they fell in soft drifts and billowed out of the loose soil where the late roses bloomed. Little by little, they became defined against each other, spiralling through the August heat. Now he saw their faces, some of them, bleached and torn faces with the skin hanging open, loose as unbuttoned shirts. One’s jaw had been smashed in with a hammer. Another was missing the back of its head; a concave scatter of bone showed where the skull should have been. Two had cords about their throats and between them stood a young man who had been run through with a sword. It had entered the small of his back and been thrust upward, its wraith of blade protruding from his mouth like an iron tongue. None had died quietly.

      Ossian shrank from them. They would not harm him, he knew. They were phantoms. But their misery stirred such horror in him that he wished only to sink down and shroud himself in the long grass. They were pressing closer, muffling his face, telling him desperate stories, in whispers thin as water… He gasped for breath and pressed his body up against the wall. When he punched, the faces would swirl to nothing about his fist, then re-form and eddy, settle with infinite patience. Behind him, the door into the kitchen was open a little way. He pushed through neck-high and slipped inside, then turned to heave it shut.

      But there was no need, for the ghosts had already lapsed, folded back into the complex shadows of the yard. He looked around the kitchen, shaking, and barely recognised the place. Stacks of unwashed plates towered there and the hanging knives glittered, and by the open window a set of crystal wind chimes sang in brittle whispers. Otherwise, the room was silent; but its silence was merely stifled noise, hysterical. The grandfather clock two rooms away was ticking like a bomb.

      “Who’s there?” asked Ossian uncertainly, and hoped with all his heart that no one would reply.

      No one did. But something began to move from the Welsh dresser at the far end

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