‘How… how do you mean?’ Dorothy inquired guardedly.
‘Well, we might write to each other.’
After a moment, Dorothy laughed again, openly this time.
‘I don’t know if that will be possible,’ she exclaimed.
‘It would mean a great deal to me if you could manage even a few lines occasionally, setting out your ideas,’ Rosemary went on. ‘There’s no one here that I can possibly confide in.’
Rosemary congratulated herself on her tone, which contained just the right amount of self-pity to suggest that she was asking Dorothy a favour rather than throwing her a lifeline. She was therefore the more surprised to find the response so grudging and constrained.
‘Well, I don’t know,’ Dorothy repeated. ‘I mean, I’ll do what I can, of course, but we can’t be sure that it’s going to be possible for me to remain in touch on any sort of regular basis. All the evidence, indeed, seems to suggest the opposite.’
The residual glimmer from the window had now completely faded. To her dismay, Rosemary found that she was suffering from the delusion that the darkness had started to swirl slowly around the room like a nascent whirlpool. The motion was as yet almost imperceptible, but the sense of what it might become was almost as disturbing as the fact that she could not seem to shake off the idea. If she could have switched on the light, the power of the illusion would instantly have been broken, but that was no longer possible.
‘Don’t be silly, Dot!’ she snapped irritably. They’re bound to let you send and receive letters. The problem is going to be this end, but I have a few ideas about that which I’ll tell you in the morning.’
She rose to her feet.
‘I’d better be going. I feel a bit…’
She broke off, ashamed of speaking of her own feelings at such a moment.
‘I’m so sorry, Dot.’
Dorothy’s voice was calm and steady.
‘There’s nothing whatever to be sorry for.’
She sighed.
‘I just wish I could tell you, Rose.’
Tell me what?’
The winding darkness was drawing her across the room, towards the bed where her friend lay. Dorothy’s arms encircled her neck, pulling her down. Their embrace was longer and harder than Rosemary quite cared for, putting a tremendous strain on her detachment and self-control, for she was determined not to blubber.
At last she managed to free herself, and stand up.
‘See you in the morning, then!’ she said briskly.
As she was about to turn away, her wrist was seized in a grip so intense it was painful.
“The poppies,’ she heard Dorothy utter. ‘Where do they come from?’
‘Poppies?’ she echoed lamely.
The fingers clamped about her wrist tightened.
“They used to be everywhere in spring. The fields were full of them. All the soft shades, red and blue and violet. You never see them now, do you? They killed them off with sprays and chemicals…’
‘You’re hurting me!’ Rosemary complained.
What she found most disturbing about her friend’s incoherent ramblings was that it sounded as though Dorothy thought she was making perfect sense. She was relieved to feel the grip on her wrist slacken.
‘Sleep well, Dot,’ she murmured soothingly I’ll come and wake you in the morning as usual.’
She tried to withdraw her hand, only to find that the tenacious grip was suddenly renewed.
‘Yet whenever they break the ground to build a road or a housing estate, there they are again, in their hundreds, as though they’d never ever been away! And at other times you never see them. So where do they come from, Rose? Where do they come from?’
Dorothy’s voice was raucous with what might have been either terror or triumph, but which in either case Rosemary felt an urgent need to dispel.
‘I really couldn’t say, Dot,’ she replied deliberately. ‘But I have no doubt that there’s some perfectly logical explanation. What does it matter, anyway?’
The grip on her wrist abruptly ceased.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Dorothy replied in a dull voice. ‘It doesn’t matter in the slightest.’
Rosemary remained standing there awkwardly for some time. Once again, she felt that she had unjustly been put in the wrong.
‘Good night, then,’ she said, a trifle coolly.
‘Goodbye, Rose.’
Rosemary turned and moved cautiously across the room towards the door. As she reached it, she seemed to hear her friend’s voice in the darkness behind her, saying what sounded very much like, ‘I love you.’ But the words were very faint, and it was perfectly feasible for Rosemary to spare them both further embarrassment by pretending not to have heard.
CHAPTER 6
She awoke with a sensation of having just left a room in which some terrible scene was taking place. The door had slammed shut behind her, and the voices raised in fury or fear were now just a fading memory. For an instant she seemed to hold the whole thing clear in her mind: she knew who had done what, to whom, and why. No sooner did she examine it, however, than this seemingly inexorable logic revealed itself to be no more than a string of feeble contrivances, rather like the plots of the detective stories with which she had used to read herself to sleep. But while those stabbings, shootings and poisonings had generated only a pleasing drowsiness, the anonymous voices in her dream had raised a terror which was still real.
The sunlight which had wakened her streamed in through the window, making even the worn rug and stained wallpaper look fresh and gay. Brusquely shaking off the torpor which was the legacy of her shallow, broken sleep, Rosemary got out of bed and went to the handbasin in the corner to douse herself with cold water. She had enough real problems on her plate, heaven knew, without indulging in that sort of nonsense!
The air was still chilly, and her breath flared in the beams of sunlight as she scrubbed and towelled. She had deliberately not drawn the curtains before going to bed the night before. Dorothy was not by nature an early riser, and it had become their habit for Rosemary to go to her room and rouse her. Never had it been more essential for Rosemary to be at her friend’s side than this morning, when Dorothy awoke to the reality of her imminent departure.
Although Rosemary had been heartened by the show of composure which Dorothy had put on the night before, she had no great hopes that the effect would last. It was one thing to be brave in advance, she knew, but quite another to retain that equanimity when the moment of truth finally arrived. Which was where she came in, as she always had. As long as Dorothy remained at the Lodge, Rosemary would be with her every instant-and even once they were separated, she would be with her in spirit!
The idea she had thrown out the night before as though it were an inspiration of the moment was in fact something to which Rosemary had devoted a considerable amount of thought. She knew it would prove a huge challenge, but that merely gave her a further incentive to bring it off. Such a challenge was just what she was going to need to see her through the weeks and months ahead. It would distract her attention from the anguish she could do nothing about, and focus it on a problem entirely of her own making and subject to her control.
There would be no time to brood on her own loneliness or indulge in gloomy speculations about what might be happening to Dorothy. Each moment of every day would be dedicated to working out the next episode of the murderous events at Eventide Lodge, a story so effortlessly complex, so endlessly fascinating, so flawlessly spellbinding, that reality would pale by comparison. Even the ordeals which Dorothy had to endure would be reduced to the status of a minor irritation, an annoying distraction when you are trying to read. This time, at least, the tyranny of the real would not prevail. Rosemary’s alternative account, tight and compelling, never losing its thread or disappointing the expectations it had created, would triumph in the end. She would answer for that!
