Jan Siegel - The Dragon-Charmer

‘She died ?’

‘Didn’t you know?’ Gus sighed. ‘She drowned. Some kind of freak flood, but no one ever really knew how it happened. Fern was saved, caught on a tree, but Alison was swept away. They found her in the river. Dreadful business. I’ve always wondered –’ He broke off, shaking his head as if to disperse an invisible cobweb. Gaynor regarded him expectantly.

‘There was that story she told us,’ said Maggie. ‘I know it was nonsense, but it’s not as if she was a habitual liar. She must have been suffering from some kind of post-traumatic shock. That’s what the doctors said about her illness later on, wasn’t it?’ She turned to Gaynor. ‘But you’re her best friend; you must know more about that than we do.’

What illness ? The query leapt to Gaynor’s lips, but she suppressed it. Instead she said – with a grimace at her conscience for the half-truth – ‘Fern doesn’t discuss it much.’

‘Oh dear.’ Now it was Maggie’s turn to sigh. ‘That isn’t good, is it? You’re supposed to talk through your problems: it’s essential therapy.’

‘That’s the theory, anyway,’ said Gus. ‘I’m not entirely convinced by it. Not in this case, anyway. There was one thing that really bothered me about that explanation of Fern’s.’

‘What was that?’ asked Maggie.

‘Nobody ever came up with a better one.’

Gaynor walked back to Dale House very slowly, lost in a whirl of thought. She had refrained from asking further questions, reluctant to betray the extent of her ignorance and still wary of showing excessive curiosity. Fern had never spoken of any illness, and although there was no particular reason why she should have done, the omission, coupled with her distaste for Yorkshire, was beginning to take on an unexplained significance. If this were a Gothic novel, Gaynor reflected fancifully, say, a Daphne du Maurier, Fern would probably have murdered Alison Redmond. But that’s ridiculous. Fern’s a very moral person, she’s totally against capital punishment – and anyway, how could you arrange a freak flood? It ought to be impossible in an area like this, even for Nature. I have to ask her about it. She’s my best friend. I should be able to ask her anything …

But somehow, when she reached the house and found Fern in the kitchen preparing supper, hindered rather than helped by Mrs Wicklow’s assertion of culinary by-laws, she couldn’t. She decided it was not the right moment. Will took her into the studio drawing-room, retrieved a bottle of wine from the same shelf as the white spirit, and poured some into a couple of bleared glasses. Bravely, Gaynor drank. ‘Are you going to show me your paintings?’ she enquired.

‘You won’t understand them,’ he warned her. ‘Which is a euphemism for “you won’t like them”.’

‘Let me see,’ said Gaynor.

In fact, he was right. They were complex compositions in various styles: superficial abstractions where a subliminal image lurked just beyond the borders of realisation, or representational scenes – landscapes and figures – distorted into abstract concepts. A darkness permeated them, part menace, part fantasy. There were occasional excursions into sensuality – a half-formed nude, a flower moulded into lips, kissing or sucking – but overall there was nothing she could connect with the little she knew or guessed of Will. The execution was inconsistent: some had a smooth finish almost equal to the gloss of airbrushing, others showed caked oils and the scrapings of a knife. Evidently the artist was still at the experimental stage. She found them fascinating, vaguely horrible, slightly immature. ‘I don’t like them,’ she admitted, ‘in the sense that they’re uncomfortable, disturbing: I couldn’t live with them. They’d give me nightmares. And I don’t understand them because they don’t seem to me to come from you. Unless you have a dark side – a very dark side – which you never let anyone see.’

‘All my sides are light,’ Will said.

Gaynor was still concentrating on the pictures. ‘You’ve got something, though,’ she said. ‘I’m no judge, but … you’ve definitely got something. I just hope it isn’t contagious.’

As they talked she considered asking him some of the questions that were pent up inside her head, but she dithered too long, torn between a doubt and a doubt, and they were interrupted.

Later, after an unsuccessful session with the plastic shower attachment jammed onto the bath taps, Gaynor retired to her room, shivering in a towel, and switched on both bars of the electric fire and the television. She was not particularly addicted to the small screen, but she had not seen a daily paper and at twenty past six she hoped for some news and a weather report. There seemed to be only the four main channels on offer, with reception that varied from poor to unwatchable. The best picture was on BBC 1. She left it on, paying only cursory attention to the final news items, while trying to warm her body lotion in front of the fire before applying it to the gooseflesh of her legs. Afterwards, she could never recall exactly what happened, or at which precise moment the picture changed. There came a point when she noticed the bad reception had ceased. She found herself staring at an image that looked no longer flat but three-dimensional, as real as a view through a window – but a window without glass. Her gaze was caught and held as if she were mesmerised; she could not look away. She saw a valley of rock opening out between immeasurable cliffs, many-coloured lakes or pools, blue and emerald and blood-scarlet, and a garden mazy with shadows where she could hear a faint drumming like dancing feet and the sound of eerie piping, though she could see no one. She did not know when she began to be afraid. The fear was like fear in a dream, huge and illogical, aggravated by every meaningless detail. A fat yellow moth flew out of the picture and looped the room, pursued by a gleaming dragonfly. For an instant, impossibly, she thought its head was that of an actual dragon, snapping jaws bristling with miniature teeth, but the chase had passed too swiftly for her to be sure, vanishing back into the garden. Then there were pillars, stone pillars so old that they exuded ancientry like an odour. They huddled together in a circle, and spiky tree-shadows twitched to and fro across their grey trunks. But as she drew nearer they appeared to swell and grow, opening out until they ringed a great space, and she could see thread-fine scratchings on them like the graffiti of spiders, and sunlight slanting in between. The shadows fled from her path as she passed through the entrance and into the circle, beneath the skeleton of a dome whose curving ribs segmented a fiery sky. ‘The light only falls here at sunset,’ said a voice which seemed to be inside her head. ‘Wait for the dark. Then we will make our own light out of darkness, and by that darklight you will see another world. We do not need the sun.’ No ! she thought, resisting she knew not what. She had forgotten it was only a picture on television; she was inside the image, a part of it, and the idol leaned over her, gigantesque and terrible, its head almost featureless against the yellow sky. It was a statue, just a statue, yet in a minute, she knew, she would see it move. There would be a flexing of stiffened fingers, a stretching of rigid lips. Suddenly, she saw the eye-cracks, slowly widening, filled with a glimmer that was not the sun. She screamed … and screamed …

Somehow, she must have pressed the remote control. She was in the bedroom, shivering by the inadequate fire, and the television was blank and dark. Will and Fern could be heard running up the stairs towards her, with Mrs Wicklow faint but pursuing. Will put his arms round her, which was embarrassing since she was losing her towel; Fern scanned her surroundings with unexpected intensity. ‘I had a nightmare,’ Gaynor said, fishing for explanations. ‘I must have dropped off, just sitting here. Maybe it was something on the news. Or those bizarre pictures of yours,’ she added, glancing up at Will.