No one was much enjoying themselves. But they stayed. Ed bought a bottle of Moravian champagne and he and Steph tried to dance, but the tiny floor space was too crowded, not just to move but to keep upright. Lara started sneezing and had to use her table napkin for a tissue. They didn't leave till two. That was the earliest any of them felt the heavens wouldn't fall if they went home. Mix got into one of his fantasies, a vindictive one this time, in which he gave a lift to Lara but instead of driving her home to Palmers Green-that was a fine distance at this time of night for a bloke who lived in Notting Dale-he imagined taking her up to Victoria Park or London Fields and pushing her out of the car to find her own way home. If by that time she hadn't been the prey of the homicidal maniacs who allegedly haunted those places. Reggie, he thought, Reggie would have dealt with her.
They proceeded in silence up to Hornsey, Mix imagining Reggie luring her to Rillington Place on the grounds of curing her hay fever with his inhaler, which would actually gas her. He'd make her sit in his deckchair and breathe in the chloroform…
"Why have you been so horrible?" she asked him after his distant "Good night" and opening of the passenger door for her. He didn't answer, but turned his face away. She let herself in through the front door of number thirteen-it would be-and banged it loudly after her. There were probably at least ten other occupants of that building and all of them would have woken up. It seemed to Mix that the place was still reverberating when he got back into the driving seat.
The night was cold and out here the wind screens of parked cars had frost on them. He didn't know the area very well, missed his turning and, after driving for what seemed like hours, found himself around the back of King's Cross station. Nevermind. He'd take the Marylebone Road and the fly over. Day and night it was busy. Traffic never ceased. But the side streets were deserted, the lamps which should have cheered them making them seem more stark and less safe than darkness.
He had to drive up and down St. Blaise Avenue and up again before he found a space in the residents' parking to put his car. If he left it on the yellow line he'd have to be out there before eight-thirty in the morning to move it. At this hour of the night, the street was packed with cars and empty of people. It was so dark between the pillars and inside the portico that it took him awhile to find the lock and slide the key into it.
Crossing the hall, he saw himself in the big mirror like a stranger, unrecognizable in the dimness. All the lights on staircase and landings were on time switches and turned themselves off, he'd calculated, after about fifteen seconds. The bulbs in the hanging lamps in hall and stairs being of very low wattage, great pools of darkness lay ahead in the twists and bends. Cursing the length of this staircase, he began to climb. He was very tired and he didn't know why. Perhaps it had something to do with the emotional stress of tracking down Nerissa and discovering where she went, or it was due to that Lara who was such a contrast to her. His legs dragged and the calf muscles began to ache. After two flights, at the first landing, where Miss Chawcer slept behind a big oak door set in a deep recess, the lights grew even dimmer and went out faster. It was impossible to see the top of the next flight. From here the floor above was lost in dense black shadow.
The place was so big and the ceilings so high that it had a creepy feel even on a bright day. By night the flower and fruit carvings on the woodwork turned into gargoyles and in the silence he seemed to hear soft sighs coming from the darkest corners. Mounting slowly because he was as usual panting, here called, as one does in such situations, his half-belief in ghosts. He had often said, of some particular old house, that he didn't believe in ghosts but he wouldn't spend a night there for anything. The habit he had got into of counting the stairs in this top flight as if he could make the figure twelve or fourteen was hard to break. He seemed to do it automatically once he had pressed the switch at the foot. But he had reached only to three when he seemed to see, in the light's feeble gleam, a figure standing at the top. It was a man, tallish, glasses on its beaky nose catching the colored light from the Isabella window.
The sound that rose to his mouth came out as a thin whimper, the kind you utter in a bad dream when you think you are screaming loudly. At the same time, he squeezed his eyes shut. With one hand stretched out, he stood there until a darkening inside his eyelids told him the light had gone out again. He took a step backward, pressed the switch again, opened his eyes and looked. The figure was gone. If it had ever been there, if he hadn't imagined it.
It still took all the nerve he could summon to go up those stairs past the spot where it had stood and across the spots of Isabella light to let himself into his flat.
A bright morning and the terrors of the night were dispelled by sunshine. Mix was having a lie-in because it was Saturday. He lay in bed in the stifling warmth of his overheated bedroom, watching a flock of pigeons, a single heron flying low, an aircraft leaving a trail like a string of cloud across the blue sky. Now he could tell himself the figure on the stairs was a hallucination or something caused by that stained glass window. Drink and darkness played strange tricks on the mind. He had drunk quite a bit and that house where she lived being thirteen was the last straw.
Getting up to make tea and take it back with him, he saw Otto far below, a dark chocolate silhouette, sitting on one of the crumbling walls against which ancient trees leaned and from which an ancient trellis drooped. In the almost identical wilderness at the end of this garden, two guinea fowl with crinolines of gray feathers pottered among dead weed stalks and brambles. Otto spent hours watching these guinea fowl, plotting how to catch and eat them. Mix had often watched him, disliking the cat but half hoping to witness the hunt and the kill. Keeping the birds was almost certainly illegal but the local authority remained in ignorance of their existence and no neighbor ever told.
He lifted out of a drawer his Nerissa scrapbooks and took them back to bed with him. This bright morning would be a good time to take a photograph of her house and perhaps another of the health club. And there would be a chance of seeing her again. Turning the pages of this collection of Nerissa pictures and cuttings, he slipped into a fantasy of how he could meet her. Really meet her and remind her of their previous encounter. A party would be the sort of occasion he wanted, one that she was attending and to which he could get himself invited. A niggling fear crept into his mind that she might have spotted him outside her house and known it was he following her to the health club. He must be more careful.
Could he persuade Colette Gilbert-Bamber to give a party? More to the point, could he persuade her to invite him to it if she did? The husband, whom he'd never met, was an unknown quantity. Mix had never even seen a picture of him. Maybe he hated parties or only liked the formal kind, full of business people drinking dry wine and fizzy water and talking about gilts and a bear market. Even if the party happened, would he have the nerve to ask Nerissa out? He'd have to take her somewhere fabulous, but he'd started saving up for that, and once he'd been seen out with her-or, say, three times-he'd be made, the TV offers would start rolling in, the requests for interviews, the invitations to premieres.
He must hedge his bets. He'd call the health club this morning and ask about joining. Suppose he found out who her guru was, or her clairvoyant or whatever? That would be easier than a party. He knew she had one. It had been in the papers. He wouldn't have to be invited to a guru's place. He could just go, provided he paid. There were ways of finding out when Nerissa's appointments were and then somehow he would get his to precede or follow hers. It wouldn't be all pretending either, it wouldn't just be a ploy. He wouldn't mind seeing someone who knew about the supernatural. If there really were ghosts and spirits and whatever or if sighting them was always in the mind. A guru or a medium could tell him.