Over fences, creepers had shawls of ice. Would the park gates be closed? No, they were open. Someone was collecting litter. A bird sang shrilly from the direction of the public toilets.
But the grass was all slathered in brittle white. It crunched under her shoes. And then people hurried past her, off to catch the early trains, and she thought of Anne, left behind. And she thought of Anne.
As she let herself into her flat (6E) Susan recalled she had gone by Crissie’s flat across the hall, (6C) and hadn’t seen it, as if it were not there.
Had she gone by the statement about Crissie like this, too?
What had the fat man said? What had he implied? Crissie had influential admirers. Presumably men she had slept with, in her trade as a prostitute. So, what she had told Susan about that was a fact after all, not a fabrication.
But also – also had the fat man been saying that they had investigated Crissie, and to protect Crissie, or her ‘admirers’ – they had left Susan herself ultimately alone? Or did he mean that Crissie had somehow learned what had happened, and asked someone, some admirer, (Heinrich maybe, Ed, or Todd) to intervene at a high level and save Susan’s skin?
Why? Why would Crissie – why would she care so much?
The curtains stood open at the arched windows, undrawn last night.
Beyond the French doors of the main room, as on the drive leading to the house, lawn and trees were frosted white.
Susan found she had switched on the central heating. It made a knocking, tapping sound. She walked up and down across the room, trying to be warm again. Should she make tea? Pour a measure of brandy? The decision was beyond her. It was like the time after R.J.
In the end, she went to the French door, unlocked it, let the icy air come slicing in. She didn’t know why she did. She didn’t understand at all. None of it.
On the recently painted bench to the left of the steps something was.
Susan turned to see.
Someone was sitting on the bench.
Susan looked.
It was the figure of a woman. Slender and straight, with loose fair hair – or hair that had been loose and fair.
“Crissie…?” said Susan.
The woman sat there, on the bench. Her skin appeared monochrome, nearly colourless. Nearly sepia… her clothes, her hair, these were covered with the white lace of the frost, which at the edges of her garments, hair, had turned to a crochet of white. In profile, one eye of dark grey crystal – that seemed daintily fractured as if by a flung stone.
But it was Susan’s eyes that had fragmented, one pane sliding across another.
She was back in the past of this living, metamorphosing house. The face she saw was not dead, but only mummified with its bitterness.
“What is the point,” said the old woman in the pumpkin house of Susan’s memory, “of my being alive? There you are, the two of you,” (She means me, and Anne, my mother) “flesh of my flesh, the children of my body, there you are, and I am alone. This is what I have come to.” It had been her fault, and perhaps she had realised that. Was it tears in her eyes? All that poison and tactless cruelty – made of regret and tears. We hated her, were allergic to her, Susan thought. As now I dislike and dread my mother.
Catherine. She had died. There in that cold park. And after that she had haunted this house. Not as a ghost, but as a poltergeist expressed from the body of a baby that became a child, miles off. In Kent. (I knew in her flat that evening, in the twilight when we put the lights on – and that’s why I’ve avoided her. Not because I thought she was insane. Because I saw what she’d told me – was true.)
As someone had said, Catherine hadn’t known she must go away. Rather, she had thought she must return to her house. And return she did in the only way she then could. Years of fascinating the cats in Jackie’s rescue centre, terrorising grumpy Mildred with knockings, opened windows, hidden things, distressing Olivia and Jeremy’s trendy existence. Only finally settling into her reborn physical self at the age of nine: Crystal, the daughter of a wealthy builder and his gold-medal wife. And Crystal’s life was to be as different from the life of Catherine as Crystal could make it. Until fate, or her burning inner will, manipulated the world, and brought her again to the vegetable house. After which, Susan knocked on the door of her flat.
Catherine had wanted love from those two who never loved her. Only this second time, one of them had.
Catherine sat on the blue bench, covered in the frost of her previous death, living now, but demonstrating how it had been.
Catherine. Who had become Crissie.
Crissie turned. She turned her head. The frost came with her lightly, like a veil. It was in her fringe, on her eyebrows, lashes. It was over every inch of her. But the grey crystal eyes were not fractured, only webbed, and they saw. She looked at Susan and smiled her ice-rimed, frozen, triumphant smile of grey glass.
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Also by Tanith Lee
Birthgrave
The Birthgrave (1975)
Vazkor, Son of Vazkor (1977) (aka Shadowfire)
Quest for the White Witch (1978)
Novels of Vis
The Storm Lord (1976)
Anackire (1983)
The White Serpent (1988)
Four-BEE
Don’t Bite the Sun (1976)
Drinking Sapphire Wine (1977)
Silver Metal Lover
The Silver Metal Lover (1981)
Metallic Love (2005)
Tanaquil
Black Unicorn (1989)
Gold Unicorn (1994)
Red Unicorn (1997)
Blood Opera
Dark Dance (1992)
Personal Darkness
