Bleeding Heart Square

towards it. On the table was a dusty brass gong, in front of which was a tray holding what looked like circulars and a small parcel wrapped in brown paper and tied neatly with string.

She bent down and sniffed in her turn. She pulled back sharply, putting her hand over her mouth and nose. ‘It’s foul. It — it couldn’t be something in the parcel that’s gone off?’

The woman came to stand beside her. She screwed up her face. ‘Looks like blood,’ she said.

‘What does?’

‘On that parcel.’

Lydia stared at it. It was true that there were rusty stains on one side of the brown paper. But surely only a lurid imagination would identify it as blood? To her relief, she heard footsteps above them. Captain Ingleby-Lewis slowly descended the stairs, holding tightly but warily on to the banister rail as though grateful for its support but afraid that it might at any moment give him an electric shock. He was wearing his overcoat but neither collar nor tie. When he reached the safety of the hall, he stared at the two women and rubbed the stubble on his chin.

‘Ah — Mrs Renton. You’ve met my daughter, I see.’

‘Is she having the attic?’

‘No. What were you talking about? I heard somebody say something about blood.’

Mrs Renton indicated the parcel. ‘There’s blood on it. See? And it stinks, too. It was smelling yesterday, but it’s much worse today.’

Ingleby-Lewis propped himself against the newel post and frowned. ‘Who’s it for? I haven’t got my glasses.’

‘Mr Serridge. Postman brought it on Friday.’

‘Well, he’s not here, is he? Heaven knows when he’ll be back.’

‘We can’t leave that parcel there,’ Mrs Renton pointed out.

‘Then you’d better open it,’ Ingleby-Lewis said.

‘Mr Serridge wouldn’t like it. He’s most particular about his post.’

‘Nonsense, Mrs Renton. I take full responsibility.’ He glared at her. ‘Open that parcel.’

She shrugged. ‘If you say so.’

Mrs Renton pulled the knot apart and coiled the string into a roll. She unwrapped the parcel gingerly. The smell grew steadily worse. Finally she drew back the last fold of brown paper, exposing an object like a misshapen egg about four inches long and two inches high. Most of it was a dark, mottled red, but there were streaks of a pale yellow embedded into its texture, and minute white specks milled about almost invisibly on its surface.

‘Meat,’ Mrs Renton said.

‘But it’s rotten,’ Lydia said, shocked.

‘I can see that,’ Ingleby-Lewis barked. Holding his nose, he came nearer. ‘Damn it, those are maggots. What the blazes is it doing here?’

Mrs Renton looked at Lydia. ‘Nothing to do with me.’

‘What is it, anyway?’ he asked in a quieter voice.

‘It’s a heart, sir,’ Mrs Renton said. ‘A rotten heart.’ At half past eleven, Captain Ingleby-Lewis went out, saying that he had an appointment and that he would not be back for luncheon. Lydia wasn’t sure what lunch would have consisted of if he had come back because she had found nothing to eat except a small tin of sardines.

Not that it mattered. A trace of the decaying meat that she and Mrs Renton had found lingered in the air, even here, upstairs and with the door closed. It wasn’t so much a smell as a pallid, unlovely ghost that probably had more to do with memory or imagination than actuality. But it was enough to stifle hunger.

Why would somebody take the trouble to send a piece of offal in the post? She tried to think about it as an anthropologist might think about the practices of a primitive tribe. After all, she was in a strange place, among strangers, and no doubt they did things differently here.

She remembered, quite irrelevantly it seemed, how Marcus had shown her a dead rabbit at Monkshill Park when they were children. He had shot it in the head with his.22 rifle. She had known what the outside of a rabbit was like, the fur, the white tail, the long ears. Now, for the first time, she saw what lay beneath the fur: the blood and bone and sinew, and the grey matter of the brain. The discovery made her sick. ‘Just like a girl,’ Marcus had said, and laughed.

She went into her room and unpacked her suitcase, marvelling at the curious assortment of clothes that she had brought with her. Apart from the hooks on the back of the door, there was nowhere to hang them so she had to put most of them back in the case. She washed the bowls and saucepan in the little kitchen but could not find a tea towel to dry them with. She returned to the sitting room and tidied it as best she could. At least it was warmer here than elsewhere in the flat because she had fed the gas meter with a couple of shillings.

By the time she had finished, the room looked almost as bad as before. She sat close to the gas fire and tried to fill the emptiness by reading A Room of One’s Own. ‘One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.’ She wondered whether Mrs Woolf had ever had to live somewhere like Bleeding Heart Square and lunch on thin air, with the prospect of dining on a small tin of sardines. Her attention strayed to her bookmark, the snapshot of her sister. The photograph had been taken on the Riviera that summer: Pamela looking mischievous in a bathing costume, with a cluster of young men around her. Looking at it made Lydia want to cry.

Her father returned a little after three o’clock. She heard his footsteps on the stairs and his coughing on the landing. He pushed open the door so violently that it banged against one of the chairs at the table. Lydia looked up, closing the book, shutting Pamela and Mrs Woolf away.

‘There you are,’ Captain Ingleby-Lewis said, sounding mildly surprised.

Swaying slightly and bringing with him a strong smell of beer, he advanced slowly into the room. He pulled off his overcoat and draped it over one of the chairs at the table. He sat down heavily in the armchair opposite hers. His waistcoat was smeared with ash but the suit had once been a good one, and the trousers were neatly creased. Perhaps he put his trousers under the mattress of his bed while he slept.

For a moment they stared at each other. The usual social niceties — ‘Have you had lunch?’ ‘I see it’s stopped raining’ — seemed irrelevant here. They were separated by five feet of threadbare carpet and an enormous gulf of mutual ignorance.

‘This can’t go on, you know,’ he said abruptly, patting the pockets of his jacket. He took out a packet of cigarettes. ‘You can see for yourself. It’s — ah — it’s not suitable.’

‘My being here?’

‘Exactly. You’ve got a perfectly good home of your own. And a husband.’

‘I’d rather stay here, Father.’ The word Father felt awkward in her mouth, as though it belonged somewhere else, but it was also a weapon.

‘But why do you want to come here?’ He struck a match with a trembling hand and squinted at her through the flame. ‘You’ve got along perfectly well without me for nearly thirty years. To all intents and purposes, that fellow Cassington is your father, not me. Anyway, you’re married now. You’re Langstone’s responsibility. He can give you everything you need.’

‘I’ve had enough of all that,’ Lydia said.

‘A wife belongs with her husband, you know.’

‘This one doesn’t.’

‘And your mother? What does she say?’

‘She doesn’t know I’m here. No one does. She won’t even know that I’ve left home unless Marcus has told her.’

He smoked in silence. A cylinder of ash fell from the tip of the cigarette to the carpet. Somewhere outside a woman was shouting, ‘So where’s it gone then, you bastard? I want it back.’ She repeated the same words over and over again: ‘I want it back, I want it back.’

Ingleby-Lewis cleared his throat. ‘I don’t mind telling you, my dear, I’ve had a few ups and downs lately. Shares not doing as well as they might. Taxation. This damned government of ours. It’s all changed since the war. If you want to live like a gentleman these days, you have to be as rich as Croesus. The long and short of it is, I can’t afford to keep you.’

‘I needn’t be a burden on you.’

‘But how are you going to live? Have you got any money of your own?’

‘A little. And I have a bit of jewellery. I thought perhaps I could sell some of it and that would tide me over