She was heading for the Central Line when she faltered at the ticket barrier. The relentless escalator would carry her down to a platform almost as overloaded as the train was bound to be. All at once she couldn't live with being borne into the subterranean dark amid a press of bodies and increasingly less air. Before she could step aside someone shoved her forwards – a businessman intent on finishing a mobile call. As she fought her way up to street level, against a descent of commuters so implacable it seemed as mindless as earth collapsing into a pit, she kept having to suppress the notion that a hand was about to seize her by the shoulder or the neck.
At last she stumbled out beneath the sky, which was too distant and too overcast to offer much relief from the pressure of the crowd, and battled along Oxford Street to the stop ahead of the one opposite the publishers. She was just in time to catch a bus, although she would have said it was full even before several passengers joined her in the aisle. As it made its ponderous halting journey to Bethnal Green, her view out of the windows was restricted to a parade of shops and bars supporting older architecture on their backs, a spectacle occasionally varied by a glimpse down a side street of a church or some other venerable building. The view made her feel all the more shut in, as though the windows were no better than antique panoramas exhibiting an artificial progress. Once she was off the bus she would breathe more freely. Had somebody behind her been gardening? That might also explain why they were so thin.
As soon as the bus reached Bethnal Green Road she left it, three stops short of hers. It sailed away before she could identify the passenger who'd stood so close. The pavements were crowded with homecomers, and even though the traders were packing up their stalls of clothes and discs and jewellery and groceries, the route still felt constricted. Charlotte took a side street that bordered a park, which accommodated several haphazard games of football and more supine forms of recreation. As she crossed the park she hesitated only once, distracted by the twitching of an elongated shadow beside her. It belonged to a young tree that must have shifted in a breeze she hadn't noticed. The tree was far too slim for anyone to have sidled from behind it or to be using it for cover.
An alley between gentrified four-storey tenements led from a gate in the railings to the pavement opposite her flat. She unlocked the door at the top of the steps and tramped up the stone stairs. Even the passage that enclosed them as they climbed from balcony to balcony felt unappealingly narrow just now. Without pausing to dump her bag in her second-floor flat she continued up to the roof.
She dropped the bag on the faded sunlounger flanked by potted plants – Susie's from the top floor – and leaned on the wall beside the communal barbecue shrouded in plastic. A train whined along the viaduct parallel to Whitechapel Road, beyond which an airliner as bright as a sunlit knife was sinking above the Thames towards Heathrow. Charlotte raised her face to the tattered sky and had taken several increasingly deep breaths when her mobile rang.
She recognised the number, though she had only ever used it to say that her train to Vivaldi was delayed. She thought it best to put on a voice as professional as it was amiable. 'Glen?' she said with a hint of surprise.
'Sure. Sorry if I'm calling when it's not appropriate, but I don't know if you need to hear the news.'
Whatever she might have expected of him, it wasn't this, especially his wariness that sounded close to nervous. 'I don't either,' she said.
'I guess that means you haven't. OK. Sorry.' His pause might have been meant to express further sympathy before he added 'I'm afraid it's about your cousin.'
'Oh, Glen, come on. Not more afterthoughts about her book,' Charlotte blurted, and then his silence gave her time to hold her suddenly tense breath.
EIGHTEEN
She had to research Thurstaston, otherwise she would be letting her family down – Charlotte, who believed she was worth publishing, and Hugh, who'd already done some of the work for her, and even Rory, who had tried in his abrasive way to help. She didn't need to think about the mirror in the cliff, even though it must have been stuck among roots in a burrow, not held in the remains of a hand. Or perhaps she could think of it if she rendered it manageable by working it into her next book. After all, the first one seemed to be letting her come to terms with the injustice she'd suffered at the tribunal; indeed, her new chapters were rendering the memory remote. Perhaps Carlotta or Hugo or Roy could find a magic mirror buried on the common or hidden in a cave by a sorcerer, and why not Arthur Pendemon, if he was as wizardly as his name suggested? Each of them would look into the mirror and see the dream they most wished for, although what would Helen visualise? Presumably her old folk in miraculously rude health, except that as Ellen tried to hold onto the idea it was ousted by the thought of confronting an altogether less welcome reflection, not an old woman but somebody who didn't even have age as an excuse for her mass of pallid bloated spongy flesh, which managed to be both puffy and sagging, a feat unworthy of applause. This wasn't a memory, it had just been a glimpse too brief to be trusted. She mustn't let it reach her nerves again. She dismissed from the screen the chapter she'd started to reread to see if any of it was worth preserving. As soon as the jittering cursor lodged on the Frugonet icon she clicked the slippery mouse.
She'd had enough of her blurred reflection. Across the street a girl was baring almost the whole of her slim bronzed self in a minute bikini on a second-floor balcony. Ellen considered stepping onto hers to catch a little of the late-afternoon sun, and imagined herself as one of a pair of figures in an old-fashioned clock; if she emerged the other girl would have to leave her lounger and retreat into her niche. Equally, as long as the slim girl was out there could be no place for – Ellen left her musings at that, because the computer had brought her the Internet. Once it responded to her password – rohtua, which had started making her feel backward when she'd learned she had to rewrite her book but which no longer did – she typed 'Arthur Pendemon' in the search box.
She'd hardly clicked the mouse when the screen filled with pallor. It was displaying a page of search results, the first of which looked promising: Arthur Pendemon's Dwelling at Thurstaston Mound. The next listing included a quotation:
. . . Arthur Pendemon, who sounds like he fancied himself as some sort of demonic economist . . .
She must have leaned towards the monitor, because her ill-defined reflection appeared to swell up. She recoiled – sat back, rather – and clenched her clammy fist on the mouse to bring up the site.
It was called Mumbo Jumbjoe, which was also the pseudonym of its apparently solitary writer. A sidebar listed topics: Flying Sauce, Pyramid Selling Ancient Egyptian Style, Happy Crappy Mediums, Where to Shove a Bent Spoon and Other Useless Tricks, Aliens Stole Their Brains . . . The page on which Ellen had landed was entitled Vic and Ed's Ectoplasmic Extravaganza, and she saw why soon enough.
Blame the Victorians and a few Edwardians while you're at
it. Eras of scientific advance my arse. Maybe they were,
but they go to show too many people that ought to know