The Betrayals(126)
He reaches out to the cobweb that’s clinging to the windowpane, idly testing its elasticity. The threads are silver, trembling a little in the draught. Instinctively he starts to swipe it away, to get a clearer view of the trees and the slope below; but something makes him pause. It’s beautiful. His heart is beating as though he’s climbed a mountain.
He turns on his heel and goes out into the dim passage and down the stairs, leaving behind the sun and the web and the fermeture.
42: the Rat
She isn’t sick. She knows what sickness is like, and it isn’t this. Sickness is waiting, drifting, blank as a grey sea, having nothing to do but surrender. Sickness is vivid pictures in her head, thirst, drenched blankets, a bitter smell. This is different. This is like shedding a skin, feeling the old world stretch and split around her, sore as a burn. She curls around her elbows and knees, conscious of her bones, and tries to breathe slowly. If she closes her eyes she sees a man falling, over and over. Sometimes the picture blurs, and it’s a woman, with a plait of hair. Then there is a red smash, and the Rat jerks upright, blinking until she is back, only seeing what’s visible. It takes a long time before she lies down again, shivering.
The noise comes and goes. If she were paying attention, she might realise that there is something wrong. In the summer the school subsides to an easy murmur, a long exhalation of relief as the servants’ workload eases; but not now, not this year. Now there is more noise than usual, thumping and dragging of trunks, emptying of cupboards, a frantic and mutinous muttering. The bus roars and recedes, back and forth, for days. And then, slowly, a silence descends that isn’t the contented quiet of high summer but something thicker, unseasonal. But she isn’t listening.
Until one day she wakes and there is no sound at all, from anywhere. She sits up, and the shuffle of her limbs reassures her for a moment that she hasn’t gone deaf. She gets to her feet. She is shaky; patterns swirl in the dim corners of the room as she walks past. She steps out into the passage and it’s like being underwater. She ventures further out, looking round, until there seems not to be any reason to be afraid. Just this muffled, dead quietness. Rats do not notice the passage of time: but some wary part of her knows it has been longer than an hour since the clock struck. The clock has always been there, the same way her pulse has always been there.
The main corridor is dark. She steps out into the middle of it and looks around, the back of her neck crawling. The windows are shuttered. Thin slats of silver daylight show between the louvres. The corridor is a long stone tunnel, the entrance to a labyrinth. She can’t make out the stairs at the far end, only a doorway and more darkness. Carefully she makes her way towards them. Silence. Such silence, not a footstep or voice or the scrape of a broom. She could be the last moving thing left on the face of the earth. She goes down the staircase.
The door at the foot of the staircase is closed. It is never closed in the day. Her heart jolts into panic, her mouth opening to gasp for air – a trap, a trap – but a second later her fingers are scrabbling at the latch and it yields. She throws the door open. The sky is flat and as pale as a pearl. She breathes deeply; but when she steps into the courtyard the terror is still there, only dulled. Closed doors, shuttered windows, silence. Solitude. A punishment. Whatever you do, darling, you must not. But it’s too late. She looks across to the part of the courtyard where the man was splashed on the tiles in the moonlight. Where Mam … But nothing is there, not even a shadow. The tiles are jet and nacre under this fish-belly sky.
She crosses the court, keeping close to the walls. In spite of the blinded windows she feels watched. The smooth cloud above her is like a pupil-less eye. She unlatches the far door and slips through it into another dark corridor. In front of her is an archway: and beyond it is the Great Hall, full of daylight from the high windows. Another observer might wonder why the servants left these windows unshuttered – laziness, rebellion, or some strange instinct of reverence? – but the Rat only moves forward, searching for something she can’t name. The floor, the benches, the walls, everything is in shades of grey and trompe l’oeil. There is no game board. The silver line demarcating the terra is dormant. Invisible.
Something crunches underfoot – underpaw – underfoot. A scatter of sharp bits digs into the Rat’s soles. Yesterday she would have stiffened at the sound and darted for safety; but now she only blinks and breathes, taking up more space. If this is a trap she is lost. She sits on a bench. She is the only audience now.
What is on the floor is ash, blown from the chimney, out of the hearth and across the stone by yesterday’s wind; no one has swept it up. Tiny fragments of soot and charred wood glint like dark dice. She can feel the fine dust of it on her feet, and one gritty piece of charcoal between her toes. Here, under the bench, the ash is thick enough for a footprint to show, just. She twists her heel back and forth until there’s a bare arc. A rat would never leave a mark deliberately: but it leaves less of a mark than a man’s body on the ground. She stares at the smear, wondering what it means.
‘Oh Jesus, I didn’t – thank God, I – what’s going on? Where is everyone?’
Simon. His voice echoes in her skull.
She looks up. There’s a pain in her gut, as if meeting his eyes is a kind of poison. She wants to be a rat again. She wants him to be only another stomach, or sometimes a warm thing in the cold. She wants not to care that he saw her push a man from a tower. She wants to scratch her human body until it peels away and leaves a little, mindless, scuttling thing. Something that doesn’t mind being alone. She has been so good at not being human, and now it has deserted her, when she needs it most.