we had always lived according to the pretence-made possible by the absence of television and magazines-that no such thing existed. And even though Waterhouse's naked nymphs were Art, I knew my mother would not see them that way, any more than I did.
AND THEN I HAD THE DREAM. IT WAS LATE SUMMER, TWO years since we'd started writing. I woke-or so I thought-in bed in my own room, everything the same except that a full moon was shining through my window. A strange moon, because its light was soft and golden, like candlelight, and warm against my face. An impossible moon, because my window faced south and the sky was blotted out by the side of Mr Drukowicz's shed, but in the dream it seemed absolutely right and natural. I lay there for a little while, feeling the warmth of its rays, until I became aware that the source of the warmth, which was now filling my whole body, was much closer than the moon.
I turned my head on the pillow. Alice lay facing me, smiling the most enchanting smile, a smile of pure joy and tenderness and love. Her head was only a few inches from mine, her red-gold-chestnut hair rippling over the pillow in the candle-moonlight, our bodies not quite touching, and for a small eternity I just lay there, floating in perfect bliss. She did not look exactly like the Lady, or any of the women in the paintings; she was simply Alice, and beautiful, and the warmth of her body flowed into mine as our lips brushed and met and I woke in my wet pyjamas, alone, to the familiar patch of neon from the streetlight spilling across the wall of Mr Drukowicz's shed. It was 1.30 in the morning.
Always before, scrubbing at my pyjamas and sheets by torchlight, I'd felt nothing but shame and dread that this time-for the stains were always horribly visible in the morning-my mother would say something. But that night I went through the routine almost absent-mindedly, praying that I would float straight back into the dream, and Alice radiant beside me.
Instead I lay sleepless for a long time, struggling in vain to recapture her face as I had seen it, the glow fading until there were only the faces from the paintings left, and I buried my own face in my pillow and wept.
As I was finally drifting in and out of sleep, I had another dream, of myself as a very small child, being read to on my mothers knee, in lamplight on our couch at night. My mother was in her dressing-gown, which made it feel very late, and she was reading from a book with no pictures, a story I didn't understand at all, but I sat listening intently just the same, following the cadences of her voice. I was watching from outside, as if my older self were sitting invisibly on the couch beside them. Then I saw that my mother was crying silently as she read. Tears were streaming down her face and splashing over my pale blue sleeping suit, but she made no attempt to wipe them away; she just went on reading and the tears went on falling until I woke again briefly to find my own pillow still damp from the tears I had shed for Alice.
ON THE SATURDAY MORNING AFTER THE DREAM, I FOUND myself alone in the house. My father was at a train men's swap meet on the other side of town; my mother had run herself late for the hairdresser. I came out into the hall when I heard the front door slam, and saw that she had-most unusually-left the door to her room open. As I moved closer my gaze fell upon the drawer I had opened on that stifling January afternoon.
My unspoken pact with my mother had kept me away from her room before this. I won't pry into your secrets if you don't pry into mine. But the door was open, and Alice was so fascinated by Staplefield, and Viola, and anything I could remember about the photograph I had found.
The drawer was still locked, and there was no small brass key in any of the obvious places. Then I remembered that the tongue-or whatever the bit that worked the lock was called-had been nothing more than a plain metal tag with a slot cut in the front end of it. So I went around the house collecting and trying keys from other pieces of furniture until I found one that fitted.
The lock clicked over. Kneeling in the half-light, breathing mothballs and insect spray and the faint doggy smell of the carpet, I saw my uneasy reflection staring from the depths of the dressing-table mirror.
The envelope and the photograph had gone. The only thing in the drawer was the book with the faded grey paper cover, mottled with reddish brown spots.
Seraphina
LORD EDMUND NAPIER LIKED EVERYthing about him pleasant and agreeable, and since he was rich, handsome, unmarried, and possessed of a splendid town house in Cheyne Walk, the world made haste to oblige him. Indeed it had been hastening-with one disagreeable exception, as we shall presently learn-almost from the moment of his birth some forty years before the afternoon upon which we find him gazing at a blank space on the wall of his private gallery.
Though the main entrance hall and staircase of his house were adorned, as might be expected, with portraits of Napiers past, this gallery was known only to Lord Edmund's most intimate associates. It was a long, vaulted, panelled room, reminiscent in its proportions of a place of worship, but lit so as to draw in as much natural illumination as possible while excluding any direct glare. The merest glance around the walls, however, would reveal Lord Edmund to be, as the phrase goes, a devotee of the female form, lavishly and variously illustrated by over a hundred canvases running the length of the gallery on either side, and supplemented by numerous pieces of statuary in bronze, marble, jade, ebony, and other precious materials; all, I hasten to add, in the finest of taste; the finest, indeed, that money could buy. But to describe Lord Edmund as a worshipper at the shrine of Beauty would be, if not precisely untrue, at least a shade discourteous. A gentleman predestined to adorn the very pinnacle of society cannot but be conscious of his own perfections; and it would be fairer to say that Lord Edmund and Beauty had long been on intimate terms. And this, paradoxical as it may seem, was the source of a certain discontentment on his side, and the reason why the wall at the northern end of the gallery, farthest from the great double doors which opened onto its vaulted length, the very space in which the finest flower of his collection ought to have been displayed, remained obstinately blank. He had, over the years, tried any number of canvases in the place of honour, but none had ever quite sustained that pitch of perfection he had, almost unwittingly, come to require of its subject.
Lord Edmund himself could scarcely have accounted for his single state, which nevertheless remained a topic of lively interest to every fashionable hostess with marriageable daughters at her disposal. Many a matron had fancied her favourite as good as engaged to his lordship, only to discover, just as she thought him safely landed, that the catch had unaccountably slipped the net, and so adroitly as to leave her without even the consolation of an action for breach of promise. In truth his lordships heart had only ever been engaged on one occasion, and that many years ago, when he was but four and twenty. The match was impossible: Miss Eleanor Brandon, though undeniably beautiful and sweet-natured (and, it must be admitted, far more cultivated and better read than the youthful Edmund himself) possessed neither family nor fortune; worse, she nurtured artistic ambitions, accepting whatever was offered her in the way of scenery-painting and the like around the studios of Chelsea. She had, at the time of their meeting, an impoverished suitor some ten years older than herself, a portrait painter constitutionally incapable of fulfilling any of the few commissions offered him; to whom, nevertheless, she was on the verge of committing her affections. But youth and charm prevailed; so entirely that Edmund could not but be swayed by the force of her love for him. He did not-at least in retrospect-believe that he had explicitly pledged himself to her; but he did speak privately to his father, the earl, who forbade not only the match, but any further association with Miss Brandon.
Edmund was of age, and sole heir, and could have defied his parent, but severe financial constraint, and a great deal of unpleasantness, would certainly have followed. What was a fellow to do? He owed Miss Brandon, at the very least, the courtesy of an interview; but that would certainly upset her, and therefore him, so how could it benefit
