Jan Siegel - The Dragon-Charmer

But all she said was: ‘I told you that TV was a mistake.’

She led the way up to Gaynor’s room and headed straight for the socket where the set was plugged in.

‘You’ll need the gloves,’ Will said. ‘Alison’s gloves …’

Fern rounded on him, her eyes bright with pent-up rage and some other feeling, something which might have been a deep secret hurt. ‘That’s what you want, isn’t it? That’s what you’re really after. You want me to open her box – Pandora’s box – play with her toys. You want to drag me down into her world. It’s over, Will, long, long over. The witches and the goblins have gone back into the shadows where they belong. We’re in the real world now – for good – and I’m getting married on Saturday, and you can’t stop it even if you call up Azmordis himself.’

‘From the sound of things,’ Will said quietly, ‘he’s coming anyway.’

‘If I didn’t know you better,’ Fern said, ignoring him, switching the glare to her friend, ‘I might think you’d been primed.’

Gaynor, absorbing the accusation with incredulity, opened her mouth to refute it, but Fern had turned away. She bent down to the socket, the sock-ball still crumpled in one fist, and flicked the switch on and off with impunity. ‘Well, well. Seems perfectly normal to me. On, off. On, off. How unexpected. And the plug – plug out, plug in, plug out. What do you know. If you’ve finished with this farce I’m going to have my bath. I told Maggie we’d be there at seven; please be ready promptly. Let’s not add bad manners to everything else.’

And to Gaynor: ‘I thought better of you. I know you don’t like Marcus –’

‘I do like him,’ Gaynor said, speaking faster than she thought. ‘But I’d like him a lot more if you were in love with him.’

‘Love!’ Fern cried scornfully – but for all the scorn her voice held an undertone of loss and suffering that checked Gaynor’s rising anger. ‘That belongs with all those other fairytales – in the dustbin.’

She ran out and downstairs: they heard the bathroom door slam. Gaynor had moved to follow but Will held her back. ‘No point,’ he said. ‘If there’s trouble coming she can’t stop it, not even by marrying boring Marcus.’

‘But I still don’t see what her marriage can have to do with – this?’ Gaynor said in bewilderment, indicating the television set. ‘Why is everything getting mixed up?’

‘I think ,’ Will said, ‘it’s all to do with motives. Her motives for getting married.’

‘She’s in pain,’ said Gaynor. ‘I heard it in her voice.’

‘She’s in denial,’ said Will.

It was not a scene that augured well for the forthcoming dinner party, but although the three of them walked down to the vicarage in comparative silence, once there the warmth of the Dinsdales’ welcome, the aroma of roasting chicken, and copious quantities of cheap red wine all combined to bring down their hastily erected barriers. Will relaxed into his usual easy-going charm of manner, Fern, perhaps feeling that she might have over-reacted earlier on, made a conscious effort to unwind, appealing to her friend for corroboration of every anecdote, and Gaynor, too generous to nurse a sense of injury, responded in kind, suppressing the bevy of doubts and fears that gnawed at her heart. By the time they were ready to leave their mutual tensions, though not forgotten, were set aside. They strolled homeward in harmony, steering the conversation clear of uncomfortable subjects, admiring the stars which had chosen to put in an appearance in the clearing sky, and pausing to listen for nightbirds, or to glimpse a furtive shadow which might have been a fox, slinking across the road towards the river. For Gaynor, a city girl like Fern, though more from career necessity than choice, the country held its own special magic. The belated child of a flagging marriage with three siblings already grown up, she had never really felt part of a family, and now, with Fern and her brother, she knew something of the closeness she had missed. The wine warmed her, the night bewitched her. She would have subordinated a whole catalogue of private doubts to preserve that feeling undamaged.

‘Perhaps we’ll see the owl,’ she said as they drew near the house.

‘I thought that was a dream,’ said Will. ‘Riding on the back of a giant owl … or did you see a real one?’

‘I’m not sure,’ Gaynor admitted. ‘Maybe it was just a dream.’

‘I’ve heard one round here at night,’ Fern said, and a quick shiver ran through her, as if at a sudden chill.

Indoors, they said goodnight with more affection than was customary, Fern even going so far as to embrace her friend, although she had never acquired the London habit of scattering kisses among all and sundry. Gaynor retired to her room, feeling insensibly relieved. As she undressed she found herself looking at the television set, disconnected now but still retaining its air of bland threat, as if at any moment the screen might flicker into unwholesome life. She thought: I don’t want it in here; but when she tried to move it, overcoming a sudden reluctance to approach or handle it, the machine felt awkward, at once slippery and heavy, unnaturally heavy. She could not seem to get a grip on it. In the end she gave up, but the blank screen continued to trouble her, so she draped a towel over it, putting a china bowl on the top to prevent the makeshift covering sliding off. Will would probably be asleep now; she could not disturb him just to help her shift the television. She climbed into bed and after some time lying wakeful, nerves on the stretch, she too slept.

She was standing in front of the mirror, face to face with her reflection. But it looked different from earlier in the day: it had acquired a sort of intense, serious beauty, an antique glamour, which had little to do with the real Gaynor. It isn’t me, she thought, but I wish it was. Behind the reflection her room, too, had changed. There were books, pictures, a pot-plant whose single flower resembled puckered red lips, a bedspread made of peacock feathers. A smoked glass shade softened the light-bulb to a dull glow. This isn’t my room, she realised. This is Alison’s room, the way it must have looked when she lived here. Mirrors remember. Her gaze returned to her own image with awakening dread: she knew what would happen with that dream-knowing which is both terrible and ineffectual, a vain striving to alter the unalterable. Dream turned to nightmare: the face before her shrank into a tapering oval, hollow-cheeked, broad-browed; the deep eyes were elongated into slits, not dark but bright, shining with the multi-faceted glitter of cut crystal. A dull pallor rippled through her hair, transforming it into the dim tresses of a phantom. Gaynor was paralysed, unable to twitch a muscle, but in the mirror her mouth widened into a thin crimson smile, curling up towards her cheekbones, image surveying reality with cold mockery. The surface of the glass was no longer hard and solid: it had become little more than a skin, the thickness of a molecule, dividing her from the other room, the other person. And then the reflection reached out, and the skin broke, and the stranger stepped out of the mirror into Gaynor’s bedroom.

‘Alison,’ said Gaynor.

‘Alimond,’ said the stranger. ‘Alison was just a name. Alimond is my true self.’

‘Why have you come back?’

The smile became laughter, a tinkling silvery laughter like the sound of breaking glass. ‘Why do you think?’ she said. ‘To watch television, of course. I’ll tell you a secret: there is no television beyond the Gate of Death. Neither in heaven nor in hell. All we are allowed to see is our own lives and the lives of those we touched; an endless replaying of all our yesterdays, all our failures, all our mistakes. Think of that, ere your time comes. Live yourself a life worth watching, before it’s too late.’