What did the kiss mean? Grace had no time to reflect. The moment she and Hans came in through the scullery a frantic Mavis greeted them. She wore a dressing gown half pulled together over pajamas. “It’s a bloody pity the police aren’t keeping a better eye on their surroundings! We wouldn’t have been burgled!”
“But we’re right down the street from the police station,” Grace said.
“Didn’t stop me back door being redecorated, did it? Now someone’s been into me home. They’re a dozy lot over there. I suppose they think you living here is protection enough!” Mavis snapped.
“Is anything missing?” Grace asked.
“Nowt so far as I can see, except for one of them crisp bars Hans gave me.”
“Any vandalism?”
“No.”
Hans pulled out a chair for Mavis and got her to sit. She was shaking, but whether from rage or fear, Grace couldn’t tell.
The cold walk back from the church had not driven the warm feelings of the dance from Grace’s memory but Mavis’ outburst succeeded. Regretfully she assumed her policewoman’s role. “What happened, Mavis?”
Hans lit Mavis a cigarette. She took a long drag and tightened her dressing gown around her before speaking. “I’d barely got home. I didn’t stay long at the dance hall. I didn’t like the crowd. One of them West Indian seamen asked me to dance. Can you believe his nerve? Well, I’d just shut the back door when I heard a noise in the bedroom. A footstep. My heart just about stopped. I didn’t move, didn’t know what to do. I stood there like I was daft. I didn’t hear anything else but I had this feeling there was somebody in there.”
“It might have been Grace,” Hans suggested.
“That finally occurred to me. I’m not used to having a lodger yet. So I started down the hall to the bedroom, cursing myself for being a fond fool, and then there was this quiet squeak, like a chair being pushed across the floor. I told myself, ‘It’s only Grace. She’d could be back early, couldn’t she?’ But when I went into the room, she wasn’t there.”
“And nobody else?”
“No. I told myself I’d only imagined the sounds. But I couldn’t make me believe myself! I put the light on and looked under the bed before I got changed. Couldn’t stop shivering so I came out here and stirred the ashes up a bit and threw on a shovel of coal and to hell with the extravagance! That’s when the pounding on the front door started. Well…”
Hans’ face darkened. “You didn’t answer it, did you?”
Mavis took a nervous drag on her cigarette. “As a matter of fact, I did, after my night caller identified himself as an air raid warden. It was Charlie Gibson from down the street. He gave me a bollicking for showing a light. ‘Your window’s calling the Luftwaffe as loud as one them fat Valkyries at the opera,’ says he. Talk about a nerve!”
“I told him it was nonsense and not too politely either. I’m always careful about the blackout curtains. He insisted I went out and looked, and sure enough they was pushed a bit apart, enough to let a bit of light out. Then I realized why it was so cold in here. The window was up a crack. The squeak I heard was the sound of it being closed. Charlie says he’ll be on the lookout for people up to no good and advised me to get the sneck fixed as soon as I can.”
Anger made Hans’ blue eyes look icy. “It’s as well you returned when you did. If you’d been here when he broke in or went into your bedroom and surprised him…I will stay tonight in case he comes back. I will sleep in an armchair.”
To her consternation, Grace found herself resenting her dance partner’s solicitude for Mavis.
Mavis placed her hand on Hans’ arm. “No, Hans, really. You’re a dear, but we don’t want the old wives talking any more than they do already, do we?”
***
For the second night in a row Grace stayed up after Mavis went to bed. Sooner or later she was bound to collapse from exhaustion, but for the time being she was keyed up from her new job, the dance, and now the break-in.
Also the idea of trying to get to sleep in a tiny room where a semi-stranger was sleeping made her uneasy.
She sat by the dwindling fire, hoping there would be no further incidents. Last night, late, the swastika painter had paid a call. Could it have been same person who had entered the maisonette tonight? Quite possibly it was. Had her presence here triggered harassment, as Wallace suggested?
Tonight she had put aside her mystery. She had had too many mysteries and enough crime investigating for now. Instead she held a Bible. Her mother’s Bible. Or rather one of them, the one her mother kept on her dressing table to read privately in her bedroom.
The one she had left behind when she vanished from Grace’s life.
Grace had stored it in a box with the few belongings her mother left behind. Later, she had considered throwing them out, but had not been able to bring herself to do so. Packing to leave Noddweir, she took the Bible with her. Now she ran her fingers over its leather cover, softened from years of handling. A speck of remaining gilt flaked off the title. The pages were so thin as to be translucent.
A memory returned. Her mother showing her a Bible. Not this one but with the same insubstantial paper. She told Grace about the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, which to the very young child made no sense at all. The word her mind fixed upon was “ghost.” The strange patterns on the pages meant nothing either. But she could see right through the paper, as if it, too, was a ghost.
For a long time afterward her mother’s Bible frightened her.
After her mother fled, the volume served as a bitter reminder of her inexplicable desertion. Now Grace could see her mother through the narrow gap where the door to her closed-off memories had been left ajar. Her mother was sitting up in bed reading and making notations by candlelight. The sight had always comforted Grace. Her mother must have been very wise to understand and add her own comments to the ancient words.
She opened the book to where the red ribbon sewn to the spine had been placed years before and saw it marked Chapter Nine in the book of Luke. Verses were scratchily underlined.
“And John answered and said, Master, we saw one casting out devils in thy name, and we forbade him, because he followeth not with us.
“And Jesus said unto him, Forbid him not: for he that is not against us, is for us.”
The phrase “Forbid him not” was underlined several times. In the margin her mother, Mae, had neatly written:
Cast out devils. Not invite them in.
What a peculiar comment to write in a Bible! At the bottom of the page was a scrawl in her grandmother’s familiar hand.
What is the difference between a persuasion and a miracle if they are for the same ends?
“Oh, Grandma!” The words spilled out, so audibly she hoped she hadn’t awakened Mavis.
She turned to the front. Inside the cover her grandmother had written:
To Mae. Read this book if you will but never forget who your mother is, and your grandmother, and all those whose blood flows in your veins.
She leafed through the almost weightless pages. In places she recognized her grandmother’s handwriting, all spikes and weirdly shaped letters. Elsewhere her mother’s neat writing stood perfectly upright as it marched along the margins. Often mother and daughter had annotated the same page. The ink bled through the pages. obscuring whatever words were on the reverse.
The story of the witch of Endor had inspired Martha enough to run her comments onto the next page. Grace didn’t read them all. Quite apart from philosophical observations, the book was filled with the kind of wise woman’s lore in which Martha had done her best to interest Grace. Next to the description of Jesus healing a blind man by spitting on the ground and placing the resulting mud over the man’s eyes Martha advised:
“If holy saliva for mud not available a poultice of rotten apples will also do.”
To which Grace’s mother had riposted:
It is not the mud that heals but the belief.
Grace put the Bible down and closed her eyes. So this was what her mother was doing, not peacefully reflecting on the Word as Grace had imagined, but dueling with Martha, the two women ducking and dodging through chapters and verses, firing salvos, searching for cover, seeking the high ground. Had Martha laid fresh ambushes when her daughter was out? Grace didn’t doubt it.
What had possessed her mother? Why hadn’t she simply tossed the vandalized book away?
The embers in the grate glowed feebly now. But a few crumpled pages, a good stir with the poker, and Grace could relegate her grandmother’s wisdom to the flames.
But, like her mother, she didn’t.
The wisdom was part of Grace’s heritage.