jerk to one side. She gasped and lifted her left hand to cover the spot where his blow had fallen.
‘Dear Christ,’ he said. ‘You’re such a silly little bitch.’
As he was speaking, she knew he was going to hit her again. It was in a sense a continuation of the first blow. Having slapped her cheek with the palm of his right hand, he reversed the thrust of his arm and increased the impetus of the swing. The back of his hand smashed into her cheekbone. The force of the blow was enough to drive her against a chair. The top of its seat caught her just below the knee. She lost her balance and fell inelegantly so her body sprawled partly on the floor and partly on the chair. A jolt ran through her. She cried out with the snaking pain it brought in its wake. She was dimly aware of Marcus standing over her.
‘I hope I don’t have to remind you again,’ he said, speaking slowly and clearly as if to a slow-witted servant. ‘You must not interrupt me when I’m in the study. Never. Understand?’
She shut her eyes and listened to the roaring in her ears. She heard his footsteps receding, the door opening and closing. She rested her head in her arm. Her body was a dark continent like Africa, she thought, full of strange peoples and unexplored places, a source of plunder for greedy men. She tried to make her mind empty, like the Sahara Desert, a perfect vacancy.
Time passed. On the mantel, the horrible French clock that Marcus’s parents had inherited from some dusty Lang-stone great-aunt ticked like a metronome. The pains in her cheek throbbed obediently in time with it. The Langstones controlled even her pain. She thought her cheek might be bleeding but did not want to find out.
At one point the men went downstairs. Fisher was saying something. He had been plain Mr Fisher when Lydia had met him at Monkshill. Just out of the army. His father had done rather well out of the war, she remembered, and Lloyd George had given him a baronetcy — or more probably sold him one. The old man had died a couple of years ago and Fisher had come into the title. Prickly, Marcus said, and he might be right. The
Left to herself, she might have stayed there for ever with her eyes fast shut. It was only the thought of the servants that made her move. Sooner or later the maid would come in to draw the curtains and light the fire, and the kettle would go on the range downstairs in the basement, ready for someone to ring for tea. She couldn’t face the servants. She couldn’t face anyone. She stood up, swaying, and opened her eyes. The light was already fading out of the short November afternoon. She went upstairs to her bedroom.
Of all the rooms in this horrible house, this was the one that seemed the least unwelcoming. She locked the door. Most of the furniture had come with the house — in other words the pieces were grim, ugly and built to last, like almost everything else the Langstones owned. But she had brought a few things of her own from Monkshill and these at least connected her with her former self. And she had her own bathroom.
She went into it and sat down on the lavatory. After a while, she looked at her face in the mirror over the washbasin. Her left cheek was unmarked. But there were signs of a bruise and a faint reddening where Marcus’s knuckles had hit her right cheekbone. His signet ring had broken the skin, leaving a smudge of blood, now dried. She squeezed the flesh between finger and thumb. No more blood.
It struck her as curious that her reflection looked so normal, so completely unaware that it belonged to somebody quite different now.
When her maid knocked on the door, Lydia sent the girl away, saying that she had a sick headache and did not want any tea. By this time, she had the smallest of her suitcases open on the bed.
Packing was not something she usually did, and she was surprised to find it so difficult. At first she put in all her jewellery, but then she took it out and sorted through it, piece by piece, discarding anything that had come from the Langstones. She kept her wedding ring, because it was a statement of fact, but decided to leave behind her engagement ring, a diamond solitaire that had once belonged to Marcus’s grandmother. She took her Post Office savings book, which was still in the name of Lydia Ingleby-Lewis, but left her chequebook and bank deposit book, which belonged to Mrs L. M. Langstone.
She did not know which clothes to take because she had no idea which clothes she would need. After a while, she lost patience with herself and filled the case with whatever came to hand. At the last moment she dropped a snapshot of her sister Pamela inside. Her pulse seemed to be accelerating. Delay was dangerous. Sometimes it was better not to think. One should act instinctively, like an animal.
When the suitcase was full, Lydia put on her hat, coat and gloves and picked up her handbag. She carried the suitcase downstairs. It was surprisingly heavy. The study door was shut. She glimpsed the glow of the fire in the drawing room. She heard voices and the clatter of crockery from the basement. The two hats were no longer on the chest. Lydia opened the front door, went outside and closed it softly behind her.
The cold air caught her throat. She wished she had brought a warmer scarf. She walked carefully down the steps and on to the pavement. The road was empty. There was still light in the sky but it was the grey, dispirited kind that was worse than darkness. She walked along the pavement, slightly lopsided because of the suitcase, and told herself that she was free. She had assumed that freedom would have at least an element of euphoria about it. Instead it seemed to be characterized by a dull sense of misery, a certain amount of physical discomfort and a worrying lack of certainty about anything whatsoever.
She reached the Bayswater Road, a river of hooting, grinding, rattling traffic. On the other side, beyond the railings, was the park where the dusk was further advanced than elsewhere. She saw a taxi approaching and raised her arm. The driver’s thin little face was almost invisible beneath an enormous cap. She wanted to say, ‘It’s as if you’ve got a mushroom on your shoulders.’ That would have been foolish. She wondered whether she were feverish.
‘Where to, miss?’
Until he asked the question, it had not occurred to Lydia that she would have to tell the man where to take her. The problem was, there was nowhere she wanted to go. But the suitcase was heavy and seemed to be growing heavier. She couldn’t walk the streets of London for ever. She couldn’t go to family or friends, either, because they belonged to Marcus as much as to her. She could have asked the man to recommend a hotel, but she wasn’t sure how much that would cost or how a respectable establishment would react to the unannounced arrival of an unattached woman with a small suitcase and a bruised face. There was, now she came to think of it, only one possibility open to her, and it had a pleasing sense of finality to recommend it.
‘Bleeding Heart Square,’ she said.
As they travelled east in fits and starts, the driver drummed his gloved fingers on the steering wheel. Outside Selfridges, a woman in an enormous fur coat was buying a red balloon from a man with only one leg. Lydia had been up and down Oxford Street hundreds of times in her life. Now, for the first time since childhood, it was strange to her. She had changed, and Oxford Street had changed with her.
The taxi moved slowly eastwards. Holborn was a different country from Oxford Street. It was darker here, too, as though the sun rarely penetrated. The taxi inched its way into the traffic around Holborn Circus and turned left into Hatton Garden. They swung right, and the driver swore at a man weaving his way across the road with the ramshackle absorption of the truly drunk. He pulled up at the kerb opposite the opening of a cobbled alley on the right-hand side. The entrance was partly obscured by a brewer’s dray.
The cabby slid back the partition. ‘Here we are. Too tight to drive in, but it’s just in there.’
Lydia opened her handbag and found her purse. There was a pub called the Crozier on the corner of the alley, its lower windows still shuttered. It was painted a curious shade of red, so dark it was almost purple, that reminded her of a joint of beef in a butcher’s window.
The taxi driver made no move to help her as she got out. He hadn’t driven into the square or offered to carry the suitcase. Not that it mattered. It was simply that it meant something. She was no longer the mistress of a house in Frogmore Place and another house in Gloucestershire. She was a woman in a plain coat and hat, carrying a small suitcase, who had asked to be taken to Bleeding Heart Square.
She paid the cabby, giving him a smaller tip than she would usually have done. He grunted, peering impertinently into her face, and drove off. Lydia crossed the road, trying to walk like someone who knew where she was going, and marched up the entry. It led to an ill-lit open space, much darker than the street she had left behind. A man passed her, walking quickly, his face no more than a white blur above his upturned collar.
Lydia glanced from side to side, fighting panic. Smudges of smoke drifted across a grey sky. Buildings reared up on every side, some with lighted windows, none matching its neighbour. In front and to the right was the jagged outline of what might have been a small church. From somewhere on the left came the sound of hammering. There were too many shadows for comfort and it was all too easy to imagine the presence of invisible watchers.
