Their table for three was beside a window overlooking the streetlamp-dotted darkness of Leicester Square, and now Lizzie had pulled off her shawl to polish the glass, and her bare shoulders glowed too pale in the glare of the restaurant’s wall-mounted gas jets.
“There’s a … new building there,” she said. “In the middle of the square.”
Swinburne, not entirely sober himself, goggled at the glass but apparently couldn’t see beyond his own reflection and the steam of his breath.
Gabriel leaned forward and squinted. The high dome and pillared entrance to the Wyld’s Globe exhibit was the only building visible out there in the dark. “Nothing new that I can see,” he said.
“That dome,” Lizzie said. “Wasn’t it grass there…?”
“That’s been there for eleven years, Guggums. Ever since the Great Exhibition.”
“Is it a church?”
“My sort of church,” said Swinburne, slouching back in his upholstered chair and reaching for the decanter of claret. “The world, introverted.”
“It’s a giant globe,” said Gabriel patiently, “turned inside out. You go in and you can see all the seas and continents around you.”
“Turned inside out,” echoed Lizzie. “I’m turned inside out. Everything around me is my own grief and loss, and inside I’m just an empty street, an empty building.”
Gabriel wished she weren’t so devoted to poetry; she wrote a lot of it, and it was, frankly, pedestrian stuff, though Swinburne loyally claimed to admire her verses.
“Nonsense, Gug,” Gabriel said. “You’re ill, it colors your mood. I think a crème brûlée and a glass of sauternes—”
Lizzie was frowning and shaking her head. “If the globe is inside out, where’s God? Rise up from one place and soon you’d only bump your head against another! And Hell — under the surface — is infinite! Don’t bury me!”
“For God’s sake, Gug, pipe down! Nobody’s going to bury you, you’re not dying. Algy, she listens to you, tell her she’s not dying.”
Swinburne was a frequent visitor at Chatham Place, and he and Lizzie were forever reading to each other, or playing with the cats, or jointly composing nonsense verses and wrestling for possession of the pen as inspiration struck one or the other of them.
Swinburne blinked at her now over the rim of his wine glass. He lowered it and said, “Don’t die, Lizzie darling. Who else could I find who doesn’t despise me?”
She sniffed and shook her head. “It’s the ones who love us that are the peril. ‘And well though love reposes, in the end it is not well.’”
Now she was quoting an unpublished poem of Swinburne’s. The young man, whose red hair was now sticking out in all directions, pursed his lips in wry acknowledgment. “But Gabriel and I love you. We’re no peril.”
“You don’t love me as much as two others do,” she whispered.
Gabriel shivered. Two, he thought; and he remembered Trelawny’s words this afternoon: … if the person were so unwise as to welcome one of them and then welcome the other one as well.
Lizzie looked back out the window, and tears stood on her eyelashes as she kissed one finger and then stroked it down the glass. “Oh, do you see her? She followed us, but she won’t come in where it’s warm.”
“Who?” asked Swinburne, to Gabriel’s alarm.
“Don’t let her get started on—” he began, but it was too late.
Lizzie was sobbing, and Gabriel pushed his chair back and stood up, waving to the waiter.
“My daughter,” wailed Lizzie, “dead but weeping, immortal but starving!” Gabriel had strode around to her side of the table and was pulling her shawl across her shoulders and shushing her, but she went on, “Is my second child to join her out there?”
Gabriel was peripherally aware of eyeglasses and red lips and mustaches turned toward them from the tables nearby, and for a moment a smell of wet clay seemed to eclipse the aromas of beef and cigar smoke and wine sauces, but he had got Lizzie to her feet and was concentrating on guiding her toward the dining room door; he could hear Swinburne’s boots rapping on the polished wood floor behind him.
Gabriel dug a five-pound note out of his pocket and thrust it at the wide-eyed waiter, who hurried to fetch their hats and coats; and after what seemed like an infernal eternity of tugging at sleeves and scarves and glove cuffs, they were at last stepping across the foyer and he was pushing open the heavy front door. Wintry air numbed his cheeks and stung his teeth as he whistled to a cab standing at the curb a dozen yards away, and when the driver shed his blanket and shook the reins, Gabriel turned to Swinburne over Lizzie’s shaking shoulder.
“Sorry, Algy,” he said, “she’s—”
“Take care of her,” said Swinburne, shivering in his too-large coat. “And thank you for dinner.” Then he nodded and set off walking away down Panton Street.
It was difficult to get Lizzie into the cab, as she kept looking yearningly back at the restaurant. Probably wanting us to wait for our dead daughter, thought Gabriel grimly as he pushed her up the step; either that or she’s reconsidering the crème brûlée.
“WHAT ARE YOU WRITING, Christina?”
“Nothing,” snapped Christina crossly, rolling the pen between her fingers. “Nothing!”
The room was too warm and reeked of William’s tarry latakia tobacco. The tassels that dangled from the runner on the fireplace mantel were throwing their usual shadow pattern on the high ceiling, and to Christina, as she looked up in frustration, the little wavering Y-shaped figures looked like tiny men clinging to a cliff edge over an inferno.
Like Catholic souls clutching the last edge of Purgatory, she thought. Filthy Romish superstition!
Her bearded, bald-headed brother blinked at her in surprise but took no offense. He never did. He had only been home for half an hour, his job at the Inland Revenue offices in Somerset House having kept him late, and he had been scribbling busily in a notebook before he had noticed her scowling over her papers at the slant-front desk below the old portrait of their uncle.
“I’m sorry,” Christina said. William was the only one of the four siblings who provided any substantial household money — Maria’s Bible classes hardly brought in a hundred pounds a year, and Gabriel’s income from his paintings was erratic and carelessly spent — and William never complained about the fact that the whole family lived off his salary. He wrote poetry too — he had probably been writing verses just now — though it was all hopelessly pedantic and uninspired.
Christina absentmindedly blew a strand of hair out of her face. “I’m trying to continue the story I burned last year.”
“‘Folio Q,’” said William, putting down his notebook and taking off his spectacles. “Continue it? Have you written it out again? I thought it was very good.”
“I know you did. But I didn’t write it.” She took a deep breath. “He did,” she said, pointing her pen up at the portrait above the desk. “Through me, through my passive hand.”
He frowned. “Do you mean you were inspired—”
“I mean he — wrote — it. His ghost did. I was in a sort of trance, and I didn’t know what I’d written — what my hand had written — until I read it.”
“Ah, you mean automatic writing,” William said, nodding in sudden comprehension. “Really! That’s why you burned it. But that’s fascinating! Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You? You’re so skeptical—”