Dark Room

largely because Meg was so uncritical in her affections. It made no difference to Meg if Betty Kingsley was drunk or sober. 'At least Meg thinks I've something sensible to say,' was her stepmother's aggressive refrain whenever she was deep in her cups and being ignored by everybody else. The irony was that Meg couldn't tolerate her own straitlaced mother for more than a couple of hours. 'You and I should swap,' she often said. 'At least Betty doesn't play the martyr all the time.'

'When was this decided?' Jinx managed at last. 'After the accident?'

'No, dear. Before. You went back to London a week ago last Friday after Leo phoned you during the afternoon. Horrible, horrible man. He called every day, pretending he still loved you, then dropped the bombshell on the Friday night. I don't suppose he was at all kind in the way he did it either.' She held the handkerchief to her eyes again. 'Then on the Sunday, Colonel Clancey from next door rescued you from your garage before you could gas yourself, but didn't have the sense to ring us and tell us you needed help.' She swallowed painfully. 'But you were so cool about it all on the Saturday when you phoned home to tell Daddy the wedding was off that it never occurred to us you were going to do something silly.'

Perhaps she'd been lying ... Jinx always lied ... lying was second nature to her... Jinx looked down at the newspaper clipping again and noticed amid the wreckage in the photograph the JIN of the personalized number plate that her father had given her for her twenty-first birthday present. J.I.N. Kingsley. Jane Imogen Nicola. Her mother's names-the most hated names in the world. JINXED! She had to accept it was her car featured there. You got drunk ... Colonel Clancey rescued you... 'There's no gas in my garage,' Jinx said, fixing on something she could understand. 'No one has gas in their garage.'

Mrs. Kingsley sobbed loudly. 'You were running your car engine with the doors closed. If the Colonel hadn't heard it, you'd have died on the Sunday.' She plucked at the girl's hand again, her warm fat fingers seeking the very comfort she was trying to impart. 'You promised him you wouldn't do it again and now he wishes he'd reported it to somebody. Don't be angry with me, Jinx.' The tears rolled on relentlessly in rivers of grief, and Jinx wondered, basely, how genuine they were. Betty had always reserved her affections for her own two sons and never for the self-contained little girl who was the product of Adam's first wife. 'Someone had to tell you, and Dr. Protheroe thought it should be me. Poor Daddy's been knocked sideways by it all, you've broken his heart. 'Why did she do it, Elizabeth?' he keeps asking me.'

But Jinx had no answer to that. For she knew Betty was lying. No one, least of all Leo, could drive her to kill herself. Instead, she dwelled on the incongruities of life. Why did she call her father Adam while his wife of twenty-seven years called him Daddy? For some reason it had never seemed significant before. She stared past her stepmother's head to her own reflection in the dressing table mirror and wondered suddenly why she felt so very little about so very much.

A young man came into her room uninvited, a tall gangling creature with shoulder-length ginger hair and spots. 'Hi,' he said, wandering aimlessly to the French windows and flicking the handle up and down, before abandoning it to throw himself into one of the armchairs in the bay. 'What are you on?'

'I don't know.'

'Heroin, crack, coke, MDMA? What?'

She stared at him blankly. 'Am I in a drug rehabilitation center?'

He frowned at her. 'Don't you know?'

She shook her head.

'You're in the Nightingale Clinic, where therapy costs four hundred quid a day and everyone leaves with their heads screwed on straight.'

Oh, but her anger was COLOSSAL. It wheeled around her brain like a huge bird of prey, waiting to strike. 'So who runs this place?' she asked calmly.

'Dr. Protheroe.'

'Is he the man with the beard?'

'Yeah.' He stood up abruptly. 'Do you want to go for a walk? I need to keep moving or I go mad.'

'No thanks.'

'Okay.' He paused by the door. 'I found a fox in a trap once. He was so scared he was trying to bite his leg off to free himself. He had eyes like yours.'

'Did you rescue him?'

'He wouldn't let me. He was more afraid of me than he was of the trap.'

'What happened to him?''

'I watched him die.'

Sometime afterwards, Dr. Protheroe returned.

'Do you remember talking to me before?' he asked her, pulling up one of the armchairs and sitting in it.

'Once. You told me I was lucky.'

'In fact, we've talked a few times. You've been conscious for several days but somewhat unwilling to communicate.' He smiled encouragement. 'Do you remember talking to me yesterday, for example?'

How many yesterdays were there when she had functioned without any awareness of what she was doing? 'No, I don't. I'm sorry. Are you a psychiatrist?'

'No.'

'What are you then?'

'I'm a doctor.'

The waxen image in the mirror smiled politely. He was lying. 'Am I allowed to smoke?' He nodded and she plucked a cigarette from one of the packets Betty had brought in, lighting it with clumsy inefficiency because it was hard to focus with one eye. 'May I ask you something?'

'Of course.'