Wicked Women Page 7

  Later, I saw her and Emily, laughing and joking over the book. I walked off, trembling with rage and humiliation, before they saw me.

  It was typical of her of course, trying to play one of us off against the other. She got like that sometimes. Whichever one of us was the gooseberry du jour would have to take it on the chin, until such a time as we were all equal again, or she favoured the other one. I know I said the clichés about trios didn’t apply to us; I just never said it was easy.

  Later, as we walked home, Emily started gently mocking her benefactor. She was good like that. It didn’t fool me, but it did console me a little.

  ‘Apparently you need to be a mathematical genius even to look at the plans,’ she confided. ‘I promised not to breathe a word of it to you of course. I couldn’t understand a word of it. All in Russian. At least, I think it was Russian. And full of these diagrams that made my head spin. But if it can do all the things she reckons, why didn’t her great grand parents or whatever they were use it on the Commies?’

  ‘Maybe it wouldn’t be any use,’ I replied. ‘After all, they don’t have souls to steal, have they?’

  We both laughed at that, though I was still fuming inside about seeing the two of them earlier.

  ‘Yeah, my grandpa says it’s the Evil Empire. Better turn right here, or we’ll bump into the girls from Oakham Senior…’

  Emily liked to think of herself as the street-wise one, and would mention at every opportunity how her parents were humble shop-keepers who had saved every penny they earned to make up the shortfall in her school fees left by the bursary. It was actually quite a large shop, financed in part by her grandfather; a Harrogate toy and novelty wholesaler. She was a good sort though, petite and freckly, with mousey brown hair, though in hindsight it seems she had a sneaky side. If I was feeling uncharitable, I might have said she was a little dull; a blank slate for Phina to write on. I was feeling uncharitable that day, and would do for many others after that. But I didn’t say anything. I don’t think either of us said much of any interest for the rest of the walk home.

  The fact is, while we both rubbed along well enough, we only really came alive in the pale blue light of Phina’s gaze. Phina made sure of that.

  The next day at school there was no sign of the little black book. Emily and I looked at each other, then to Phina. She returned our enquiring looks with guileless blandness.

  ‘So, Rebecca, have you any new music to tell me of?’ she asked. ‘What was the band you mentioned last time: The Thrashing… Moses?’

  ‘Throwing Muses,’ I laughed.

  Phina knew my tastes ran to the more outré, in contrast with Emily, who thought she was being incredibly avant-garde listening to Soft Cell.

  ‘And you, Emily,’ Phina continued. ‘Have you anything you wish to tell me?’

  The girl did a little double take, and blushed. I could tell what she was thinking. Did Phina somehow know of her conversation with me on the way home from school?

  ‘Er, no. Not really,’ she mumbled. ‘Nothing at all.’

  ‘Ah, Emily, your life is as uneventful as ever,’ Phina replied with a cold smile, then she sighed, as if she knew what we had both been thinking all along. ‘I suppose you’re both wondering what has happened to the instruction manual for the Kravolitz.’ It was the first time we had heard the name. ‘Don’t worry.’ She went on. ‘It is in safe hands. Actually, Mr Callaghan has it.’

  Mr Ted Callaghan was the Craft Design and Technology master. For reasons I still find hard to fathom, he kept an autobiography of Enoch Powell on his desk. I often wondered how this helped him instruct us in the manufacture of dovetail joints. One thing was certain: he held Seraphina Ilyana Belosselskya-Belozerskya in high regard. It was well-known around the school that he thought teaching carpentry to girls was a waste of time. At the beginning of each of his lessons, he would stand before us in his paint-flecked blue workshop-coat, his long, lugubrious face crowned with a shock of equally paint-flecked white hair, and tell us so in no uncertain terms. As the Head Teacher’s progressive ideals instructed him otherwise - and Mr Callaghan remained one of the tiny minority of male staff members - he always stuck out like a sore thumb; battered by one of his own hammers.

  Perhaps it was Phina’s complete lack of interest in the finer points of these ‘masculine’ arts that he found so appealing. Or maybe, with her White Russian background, he looked upon her with near religious awe. Whatever the reason, she seemed to have some kind of hold over him, possibly similar in nature to the influence she exerted over Emily and me. She began boasting that he was using all his spare time to construct the artefact according to the specifications in the little black book. It took him several weeks to complete, by which time the half-term break was drawing near.

  Emily and I were in attendance when the handover took place. Mr Callaghan looked more gaunt than usual as he opened the door to his Nissen hut, gazing at Phina with smitten deference, glancing at me and Emily with ill-concealed distaste. There was something else there in his seedy, jaded old eyes; something haunted. He looked like a shell-shocked war veteran, with the pencils in the left-hand breast pocket of his blue workshop coat as his tarnished medals.

  ‘Poor Mr Callaghan, you look tired,’ said Phina in a softly soothing voice. ‘He’s been working through the night to finish my Kravolitz,’ she told us. Her voice hardened almost imperceptibly as she asked him: ‘You have finished it?’

  Slowly he reached inside the pocket of his workshop coat, and handed her the strangest object I’ve ever set eyes on.

  It was hard to imagine it forming any kind of recognisable shape. It was all angles, random and irregular. Euclidean geometry seemed to have gone into retreat. It consisted of what seemed like hundreds of fragments of polished wood, joined together by who knew what system of tiny springs and hinges.

  ‘I tested it as well, Miss Seraphina,’ he murmured in a kind of low croak, nothing like his usual harsh, hectoring tone. ‘It took me all night to solve the puzzle, but as you can see, it’s reset itself now. Not sure how. Must have been the springs…’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Callaghan,’ she replied, and then with effortless condescension, she added: ‘Or may I call you Ted?’

  He said nothing, only gave a little bowing nod of the head. His grey face assumed a pinkish tinge: God help him, he was blushing!

  Emily and I exchanged glances, smirking at her boldness and his reaction.

  ‘Well, Ted, you should not have been the first to try the Kravolitz. It should have been me. But I forgive you. You were just making sure it was in working order, yes?’

  Again, the CDT teacher nodded pathetically.

  ‘Now you may rest.’

  As she said this, she stretched out her impeccably manicured hand. For an awful moment, it looked as if he would bend his head and kiss it. Instead he meekly dropped the odd toy into it. Then she ambled slowly away from the Nissen hut, turning it around in her hands, me and Emily following closely in her wake. Emily’s eyes were fixed doggedly on the puzzle.

  Later, I saw them deep in earnest conversation in the senior common room, the toy lying between them. Emily’s hand moved close to the thing, and then Phina grabbed it away from her. As they carried on discussing whatever it was they were discussing, Phina’s hand remained firmly attached to it. And so did Emily’s eyes. I had never seen them so passionately captivated by anything or anyone, except by Seraphina of course.

  I could see why. Emily was in the running for ‘A/S’ Level Maths, and its perverse geometry must have been a source of deep fascination for her. For my part, I had contrived to dismiss the whole Kravolitz business from my mind. It was obvious that the other two were excluding me, thick as thieves as they were; so I wasn’t going to give Seraphina the satisfaction of showing any interest in the thing.

  Everything changed when it went missing.

  It was the last day of term, and I was in the library, reading a story by Alexander Pushkin: ‘The Queen of Spades’. Emily had man
aged to get permission to leave school early for the half-term break, because her parents were driving to Harrogate to visit her grandfather. When I saw Phina come in, I wondered if she was going to mention her illustrious family again. The last time she saw me reading it, she had hinted that one of her forebears was the inspiration for the wicked old Countess in the story. Perhaps the Comte de Saint Germain had been some kind of influence on the mysterious puzzle Phina had procured.

  It was the whereabouts of her artefact that was on her mind, however.

  ‘Have you seen it?’ she demanded, looking at the table I was leaning on, as if she suspected me of concealing it under my library book.

  ‘Seen what?’ I replied, with deliberate obtuseness.

  ‘The Kravolitz!’ she hissed. ‘Where is it? Have you got it?’

  ‘Phina, what would I be doing with it?’ I replied, with heavily sardonic emphasis. ‘I really couldn’t be less interested in your little toy…’

  I turned back to my book, but she slapped it down on the table. The echo it made in the silent room drew the librarian’s severe gaze. I noticed that Phina had abandoned her usual coy decorum and the rather affected Russian speech patterns I’d always suspected concealed a demure Home Counties accent.

  ‘Toy!’ she raged, her pale eyes flashing. ‘The Kravolitz isn’t a toy, Rebecca. Haven’t you heard what happened to Mr Callaghan?’

  Slowly I shook my head. I had sensed an odd atmosphere around the school, muttered conversations between members of staff, and police officers wandering around, but I’d been too caught up in my own angst to take much notice; as we often are at that age.

  ‘An accident. A terrible accident. That’s what the head mistress said. He lost control of the circular saw in the work-shop. It took his head clean off…’

  A vision formed in my head of a paint-flecked white-haired head inclined on a work bench, seedy old eyes watching indifferently as a whizzing blade whirled towards his scrawny, turkey neck…

  I was aware of her studying my reaction. It also struck me that she had seemed more distressed by the loss of her trinket than by her admirer’s demise.

  ‘I don’t think it was an accident, Rebecca.’ By now she was whispering, her face close and confidential, the melodrama of her story restoring her Russian accent and phrasing. ‘I think that he took his own life, because he had stared into the Beautiful Face. That is what Kravolitz means. Short for Krasivoye Litzo. Krasivoye: beautiful. Litzo: face. That is what you see when you solve the puzzle.’

  ‘Why would seeing that have made him--?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s a sort of Russian joke. I have never seen it. Never mind that: I must find it before it falls into the wrong hands!’

  ‘Yes, well, like I said, I haven’t got it. Are you sure Emily hasn’t borrowed it?’

  ‘Borrowed it? Where is she, Rebecca?’

  Then we both remembered that she’d left early for Harrogate.

  III

  I’ve often wondered what had possessed Emily to spirit the thing away with her. In my more fanciful moments I’ve even thought that the answer might have been Phina herself. Had she noticed the covetous way Emily had gazed at it, and deliberately left it somewhere where she knew the poor girl might find it? I’ve often wondered if what happened afterward was Phina’s way of punishing Emily for telling me about the book behind her back, or daring to think that she, mousey little Emily Blunkett, was worthy of staring into the eyes of the Kravolitz. Phina had implied that this was like staring into the eyes of Medusa, or a visual analogue of the Mandrake’s scream. I can’t really believe she planned things this way. She seemed as distraught as anyone about what happened.

  From what I heard, screaming was what Emily was doing when they cut her from the wreckage of her parents’ car; not killed outright like they were. I think she just wanted to show it to her grandfather in Harrogate, who I imagine might have been very interested in seeing it; perhaps even developing it for manufacture. She knew Phina would never have allowed this, so on an impulse, she took it. At least that’s what I thought at the time. Except that she never made it as far as Harrogate.

  She was still screaming when they admitted her to theatre to amputate her leg. Not about the pain. Screaming about the face she saw; the eyes, the eyes and their terrible, cruel beauty. This is what I heard, anyway. I never heard it from Emily herself of course. She didn’t make it out of theatre. Complications to do with the general anaesthetic, they said.

  Of the Kravolitz, there was no trace. Everyone assumed it must either have been lost in the wreckage, or else have flown out of the window on impact to land among the whispering trees and scrub bordering the motorway hard shoulder.

  Sometimes, in my more uncharitable moments, I wonder if this was why Phina was so distraught about the accident.

  IV

  The atmosphere when school reconvened was naturally sombre, and Phina and I began to see less and less of each other as I knuckled down to ‘A’ levels and tried not to think about what had happened. It’s always been the way I cope with trauma, throwing myself into work or some other all-consuming but ultimately empty activity. It’s how I got through the divorce, for example. It’s what enables me to put off visiting Phina in the acute ward.

  And that was how I began to put an increasing distance between her and me during that last year at school. We drifted out of each other’s lives, until I was left wondering if we’d ever really known each other at all. To be honest, I can’t even truly recall quite when she left. It was a bit like that during the final term: more and more girls leaving to become debutantes or whatever it was they did. This was different though. We had been close at one point : sort of. The three-way thing hadn’t always worked, and grief had not brought the two survivors together. Rather it seemed to widen the gap between us. Looking at her now, I often wonder if she ever existed at all, the Phina I knew then, that is.

  After my undistinguished career as an undergraduate, I carried on drifting, this time into marriage, to a TV producer called Martin. I had been married to him for about three years when Phina washed up on our door step.

  She had been wandering the country, scouring all the antique shops and flea markets she could find, in search of her precious Kravolitz. It was a different version of Phina that knocked on our door that day. Her blue eyes looked paler than ever framed by livid eye-liner as black as her hair. Her skin looked paler than ever too. She looked as if she hadn’t been sleeping properly. How she had tracked me down to this address? I wondered. She had her ways, she said vaguely, then asked me if I was going to invite her in. Martin was hovering uncertainly behind me, and raised no objection when I ushered her across the threshold.

  I asked her what she’d been up to, and she mentioned some work designing games, computer games, an emerging new industry then, again all rather vague. She soon started rambling about game theory, and Martin seemed to wake up suddenly: apparently he had heard of it through the media circles he moved in. Over the bottle of wine he opened, she said she was researching a book.

  ‘It’s about rare toys and trinkets,’ she smiled, ‘and their influence on the imagination.’

  ‘What, like Chinese puzzle boxes: that sort of thing?’ he prompted, his eyes eager.

  ‘That sort of thing,’ she replied airily. ‘I used to have this wonderful doll’s house,’ she continued, her eyes dreamy. ‘It was so real I used to think that the people in it were alive somewhere, in a larger but identical house.’

  ‘Like in that Robert Aickman story,’ he grinned. I hadn’t seen him so animated in months.

  ‘Robert Aickman?’ she queried.

  ‘Oh, an author Martin likes. I’ve read him too. He is rather good.’

  She didn’t even glance my way. Neither of them did. I was the one that introduced him to Aickman, as if anyone cared.

  ‘They sold my dolls’ house in the end.’

  ‘Really? I think something like that happened in the Aickman story. And then there’s that one
about the king who has a toy maker build a life-size, life-like replica of him, a kind of clockwork automaton. Then the real king dies…’

  ‘Is that by this… Robert Aickman of yours, Martin?’

  She was putting on her irritatingly coy voice again, but for all her affected girlishness, she seemed a faded image; a shop-worn doll of her teenage self.

  ‘Oh no, that’s by Gerald Kersh,’ he laughed.

  ‘I should write this down for my book. Toys are so fascinating. Those Chinese puzzle boxes… You can imagine a whole universe crouching inside them. I wanted to do a chapter on them. That’s why I so wanted to find again the Kravolitz. For my research.’

  I could see Martin making as if to refill Phina’s empty glass, so I said:

  ‘This book of yours. Do you have a publisher for it?’

  Martin’s forearm was frozen in the act of lifting the wine bottle, at the harshness I’d only half intended to put into my voice. Phina’s limpid blue stare met mine. Noticing the offered bottle, she shielded her nearly empty glass with her pale hand.

  ‘No, thank you, Martin. It is very kind of you, but I must drive. I am going this afternoon to pursue another lead in my research.’

  She rose from the table, and made for the door, leaving me wondering as I have often done since: was she really hunting the Kravolitz for her book, or had she dreamed up the book as a pretext in her quest for it?

  V

  I suppose the scene I found that evening was inevitable. I had arrived home prematurely from whatever meaningless project I was using at the time to fill the loveless, workless, childless vacuum of my married life. The empty wine bottles on the table. The moans from the bedroom.