‘That’s all right.’ I slipped the card back in my pocket. ‘I’m just really glad you’re open,’ I said. And then, not wanting to appear eccentric or over-eager, I added, ‘You must hear that all the time.’
She smiled uncertainly. I noticed how the sleeves of her kimono widened below the elbow, dark trumpets from which her arms emerged, like music. Her beauty was just the prelude to something even more exquisite. I looked away into the foyer, my happiness extravagant, baroque.
‘You’ve been here before, then?’ I heard the girl say.
Turning to face her again, I felt a momentary stab of disappointment. Somehow I had expected her to remember. ‘I was here last night.’
‘So you know where to go?’
‘I thought you wanted me to pay.’
She laughed and shook her head, the light skidding off her hair. ‘I don’t know what’s got into me today.’
I laughed with her. ‘It’s been an odd day for me too.’
She named an amount, and I slid the money into the shallow metal bowl at the base of the perspex screen. I took one final look at her, which she failed to notice, then I parted the velvet curtain and passed on into the corridor beyond.
When I reached the triangular room, the man in the black clothes stopped me by putting a hand on my arm. ‘You’ll have to wait.’
I sat down on the only other chair. The man was seated to my right. I hadn’t looked at him properly the previous night. There hadn’t been time. He had hooded eyes, which he kept lowered, and his hair was cropped so short that I could see his scalp. His face was made up of cavities and hollows, as if the bones had been broken and then imperfectly reset. Though his clothes looked new, they seemed dated, archaic. He was dressed like a footman, I thought, or notary — or even a church-warden. In his left ear he wore an earpiece, which would be how he received instructions from elsewhere in the club.
I looked still more closely.
His ankles, though long and spavined, were sheathed in expensive black silk socks. The ankle-bones protruded in the way that Adam’s apples sometimes do.
A pulse beat patiently in the thick vein on the left side of his neck.
This was like no waiting I had ever known. I wasn’t upset by the delay, or even curious. I simply assumed there must be a good reason for it. I felt physically comfortable, despite the cramped nature of the room and the hardness of the chair. Time was just a pool in which I happened to be floating. At one point I smelled violets. Not the real flowers, though. A synthetic version. They must have opened secret vents and released some kind of air-freshener into the room.
At last, and without looking up, the man signalled to me, a peculiar double gesture of his left hand, as if he were brushing cobwebs from in front of his face.
‘You can choose a door.’
I chose the second door from the right. As my hand closed over the door-knob, I shut my eyes, and it wasn’t Jones I saw but the girl who looked like Marie, her face lifting slowly to mine … I stepped through the doorway. This time I felt nothing. I glanced instinctively at the palm of my hand. There were no marks, no tiny punctures, no telltale beads of blood. Something opened in my stomach, bottomless, like an abyss. I was standing in a room I hadn’t thought about in more than twenty years. There was my bed, the blankets and the eiderdown pulled back, part of the top sheet trailing on the floor. I had been sleeping in this room when the soldiers came, the beams from their torches lurching across the pale-blue walls. I had always slept here, even as a baby. The air itself seemed to remember me.
I moved into the alcove where the window was. Sunlight was falling on the copper beech in the front garden. I had climbed its branches so many times. I knew them off by heart. And the road beyond, I knew that too, its pavement smooth enough for rollerskates, and then the dark curving scar on the tarmac where a car had swerved to avoid me when I was six. I faced into the room again. Draped over the end of the bed was one of my father’s old gowns from the university. I would put it on when I was pretending to be a vampire or a wizard. I ran my hand over the white fur collar, and a word appeared on my lips, familiar but magicaclass="underline" ermine … Smiling, I turned away.
On the mantelpiece was my favourite piece of rock. I had found it halfway up a mountain while on holiday. It had rained so hard that morning that the footpath had become a shallow stream. Veined with turquoise and tawny-gold, the rock looked valuable, like treasure. Back home, though, it dried out, quickly fading to a dull grey-green. My parents told me I should keep it in water — in a fish-tank, perhaps — then it would always look the way it had when I first saw it and I would never be disappointed, but somehow I had never taken their advice, and it had sat there above the fireplace ever since …
That dropping feeling in my stomach again, though steeper this time, and faster. I had been so startled by the room and then so caught up in its spell that I had overlooked the fact that it was just one fraction of the house, and that the bedroom door would take me to the rest of it, and that my mother and father might be somewhere close by. I stood still and listened. No voices came to me, and yet I had the sense that they were both downstairs. I thought I could hear the washing-machine, for instance. The whirr of it, then the shudder.
I opened the door, stepped out on to the landing. The dark wood of the banisters, almost black. The stairs, carpeted in pale-pink. And then the hall below, in shadow … There was another noise now, harsh and rhythmic. It was me, I realised. It was the sound of my own breathing.
‘Matthew?’
My stillness seemed to thicken, to intensify.
‘Darling, are you coming down?’
I couldn’t see my mother, but I knew she would be standing by the kitchen door, the fingers of her right hand curled around the leading edge. She would be looking upwards, in the rough direction of my bedroom. Beyond her, the table would be set, with bread and marmalade, a pot of tea, and if it was the weekend my father would be there.
Though I couldn’t move, I found my voice and called out, ‘Coming.’
I felt so buoyant in that moment, so free, and I stepped back into my bedroom, thinking I would take one more look at it, only to be confronted by walls that were red and a ceiling that was black. I swung round. My bedroom was no longer there. The piece of rock, the gown, the window framing sunlit trees — all gone. There was only a row of pale-gold doors. I reached for the door that was second from the right, but a voice stopped me.
‘Only one choice allowed.’
I turned to see the man in dark clothes sitting on his chair. ‘What?’ I said. ‘You never told me that.’
The man rose to his feet. Standing only a few inches from me, he somehow gave the impression that he could expand rapidly to fill an enormous space. He was like something in its concentrated form.
‘This way.’ Taking me firmly by the arm, he propelled me through a curtain and out into an unlit corridor. If only I had not turned back. If only I’d gone on across the landing down the stairs …
I stood on the towpath, my eyes angled towards the ground, one hand wrapped around the lower half of my face. The rain had stopped, but I could hear water everywhere, like a tongue moving inside a mouth.
A blast on a horn made me jump. I looked up. My taxi was still waiting, the small craft rocking and swaying in the wake of another boat. I nodded at the driver to let him know I was aware of him, but couldn’t bring myself to leave.
In the end, though, there was nothing for it. I crossed the towpath and climbed down into the taxi. The driver turned in his seat with the self-righteous air of someone whose perfectly good advice has been ignored.
‘You see?’ he said. ‘I told you there was nothing there.’