Hilary Mantel - Beyond Black

Meanwhile Colette moved scornfully on her trajectory, helpfully clearing an ashtray or righting an upturned hobbit: anything to allow herself to lean in close and listen. She evesdropped on Cara, Cara with her cropped head, her pointy ears, her butterfly tattoo: Your aura’s like your bar code, think of it that way. So your husband’s first wife, could that be the blonde I’m seeing? I sense that you are a person of great hidden drive and force of will.

“Would you like a cuppa from the machine, Mrs. Etchells?” Colette called, but Al’s grandmama waved her away.

“Have you known the joys of motherhood, dear? Only I’m seeing a little boy in your palm.”

“A girl, actually,” said her client.

“It may be a girl I’m seeing. Now, dear, and I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, and I don’t want to alarm you, but I want you to look out for a little accident that could happen to her, nothing serious, I’m not seeing a hospital bed, it’s more as if—as if she might just fall over and cut her knee.”

“She’s twenty-three,” said the woman coldly.

“Oh, I see.” Mrs. Etchells tittered. “You must have been very young, dear, when you knew the joys of motherhood. And just the one, is it? No little brothers or sisters? You didn’t want, or you couldn’t have? Am I seeing a little op, at all?”

“Well, if you call it little.”

“Oh, I always call an op little. I never say a big op. It doesn’t do to upset people.”

You daft old beggar, Colette says to herself. What is this joy , what is this word and what does it mean? The psychics say, you’re not going to find joy in the external world, you’ve got to go looking for it inside, dear. Even Alison goes along with the theory, when she’s in public mode; privately, back in Wexham, she often looks as if it’s a hopeless task. Rummaging in your heart for joy ? May as well go through the bins for it. Where’s God? she had said to Al. Where’s God in all this? And Al had said, Morris says he’s never seen God, he doesn’t get out much. But he says he’s seen the devil; he says he’s on first-name terms with him; he claims he beat him at darts once.

And you believe that? Colette asked her, and Al said, no, Morris, he drinks too much, his hand shakes, he can barely hit the board.

For Saturday night the hotel had put on a late buffet for the psychic party: crinkled chicken legs stained the colour of old walnut, a wheel-sized quiche with a thick cardboard base. There was a cold pasta salad and a bowl of complicated-looking greenery that Colette turned, without enthusiasm, with the utensils provided. Raven sat with his desert boots on a coffee table, rolling one of his special cigarettes. “The thing is, have you got The Grimoire of Anciara St. Remy? Only it’s got forty spells, with detailed diagrams and conjuring charts.”

“You selling it?” Silvana asked.

“No, but—”

“But you’re on commission for it, am I right?”

Oh, they’re such cynics, Colette thought. She had imagined that when psychics got together they’d talk about—well, things of the psyche; that they would share at least a little of their bemusement and daily fear, the fear that—if she could judge by Alison—was the price of success. But now, a little way into their association, she understood that all they talked about was money. They tried to sell things to each other, they compared their rates, they tried to hear of new stratagems—“Believe me, it’s the new aromatherapy,” Gemma was saying—and to learn about new tricks and fiddles that they could try out. They came to swap jargon, pick up the latest terms: and why do they look so ridiculous? Why all these crystal pendant earrings swinging from withered lobes; why the shrunken busts exposed in daylight, the fringes, the beading, the head scarves, the wraps, the patchwork, and the shawls? In their room—just time, before the buffet, to freshen up—she’d said to Alison, “You criticize my holdall, but have you seen your friends, have you seen the state of them?”

Alison’s silk, the length of apricot polyester, lay folded on the bed, ready to be draped next day; in private life she flinches at its touch—oh yes, she has admitted she does—but somehow it’s necessary, she will claim, as part of her public persona. With the silk around her studio portrait, she loses the sensation that she is shrinking inside her own skin. It blunts her sensitivity, in a way that is welcome to her; it is an extra synthetic skin she has grown, to compensate for the skins the work strips away.

But now Colette moved around the room, grumbling. “Why does everything have to be so tacky? That fairground stuff. They can’t think it impresses anybody. I mean, when you see Silvana, you don’t say, ooh look, here comes a gypsy princess, you say, here comes a withered old slapper with a streak of fake tan down the side of her neck.”

“It’s—I don’t know,” Al said. “It’s to make it, like a game.”

Colette stared. “But it’s their job. A job’s not a game.”

“I agree, I agree completely, there’s just no need these days to dress up as if you were in a circus. But then again, I don’t think mediums should wear sneakers either.”

“Who’s wearing sneakers?”

“Cara. Under her robes.” Al looked perplexed and stood up to take off a layer or two. “I never know what to wear myself, these days.” Suit your outfit to the audience, to the town, had always been her watchword. A touch of Jaeger—their clothes don’t fit her, but she can have an accessory—feels eternally right in Guildford, whereas down the road in Woking they’d mistrust you if you weren’t in some way mismatched and uncoordinated. Each town on her loop had its requirements, and when you head up the country, you mustn’t expect sophistication; the farther north you go, the more the psychics’ outfits tend to suggest hot Mediterranean blood, or the mysterious East, and today maybe it’s she who’s got it wrong, because at the fayre she had the feeling of being devalued, marked down in some way … that woman who wanted Vedic palmistry … .

Colette had told her she wouldn’t go wrong with a little cashmere cardigan, preferably black. But of course there was no little cardigan that would meet Al’s need, only something like a Bedouin tent, something capacious and hot, and as she peeled this garment off, her scent came with it and wafted through the room; the whiff of royal mortification was suppressed now, but she had told Colette, do alert me, I shan’t take offence, if you catch a hint of anything from the sepulchre.

“What can I go down in?” she asked. Colette passed her a silk top, which had been carefully pressed and wrapped in tissue for its journey. Her eye fell on the holdall, with her own stuff still rolled up inside it. Maybe Al’s right, she thought. Maybe I’m too old for a casual safari look. She caught her own glance in the mirror, as she stood behind Alison to unfasten the clasp of her pearls. As Al’s assistant, could she possibly benefit from tax allowances on her appearance? It was an issue she’d not yet thrashed out with the Revenue; I’m working on it, she said to herself.

“You know this book we’re doing?” Al was hauling her bosoms into conformity; they were trying to escape from her bra, and she eased them back with little shoves and pinches. “Is it okay to mention it on the platform? Advertise it?”

“It’s early days,” Colette said.

“How long do you think it will take?”

“How long’s a piece of string?” It depended, Colette said, on how much nonsense continued to appear on their tapes. Alison insisted on listening to them all through, at maximum volume; behind the hissing, behind whatever foreign-language garbage she could hear up front, there were sometimes startled wails and whistles, which she said were old souls; I owe it to them to listen, she said, if they’re trying so hard to come through. Sometimes they found the tape running when neither of them had switched it on. Colette was inclined to blame Morris; speaking of which, where—