‘YOU SPEND TOO much time moping around the house,’ said Ixora. ‘It’s not healthy.’
John was standing at the window with his back to her, watching as a fresh squall of rain spackled the swaying leaves beyond the glass. From somewhere above came the steady drip of water leaking through a ceiling. ‘I have to think of a way to make some money,’ John replied. ‘It’s the wrong time to be looking for a job, and I can’t start up on my own without capital.’
Ixora raised her eyes to the ceiling. ‘The roof will have to be repaired if this rain keeps up.’
‘At least that will be covered by your insurance.’
‘It would if I had any.’
‘You’re not insured?’
‘I never got around to it.’
He looked back at her. ‘Where are you going?’
‘Audition for a commercial.’ She was dressed in an expensive black woollen jacket and skirt, part of the wardrobe she referred to as her ‘combat outfit’.
‘It’s Christmas Eve,’ he said absently, turning back to the window. Ixora laid an arm across his shoulder with a tired sigh.
‘Stop thinking about the past so much, John. What’s done is done.’
‘I just want to understand it,’ he said. ‘Why do you think that guy killed Howard?’
‘Who knows? I’m trying not to think about it.’
‘Well, I can’t help it.’ Nothing about the recent past felt satisfactory or resolved. Any attempt at analysis merely reminded him of his doubts about Ixora.
‘I don’t suppose they’ll ever find out. These things are never clear cut.’ She moved her hands around his waist. ‘Who are you blaming?’
‘For what?’
Ixora shrugged. ‘Losing your job, Howard’s death, everything. You wander about the house like a soul in torment. And you don’t trust me.’ The room had suddenly grown dark around them, casting her eyes in pools of shadow.
‘You don’t know that.’
‘Yes, I do. If you completely trusted me, you’d have shown it.’
‘How?’
‘I think you’d have asked me to marry you.’
‘Christ, Ixora, it’s hardly the right time. I’m not even divorced yet.’ And I’m not completely sure that I want to be, he added mentally.
He had called Helen half a dozen times in the past two weeks and had yet to catch her at home. Christmas gifts hand delivered to her and Josh had been returned unopened. Last night he had waited until Ixora was asleep before ringing the house at 2.15 a.m. but there was still no reply. Could she have met someone? Perhaps she had changed her mind about wanting him back. If she failed to contact him, the divorce would continue to proceed.
‘Let’s do it,’ Ixora cried suddenly, clutching at his arms, ‘The time is never going to be right, don’t you see? Let’s not wait any longer. It may be the only way you’ll learn to have faith in someone again. Making a decision will make you strong.’ She forced him back from her. ‘Propose to me, right now.’
‘Don’t be silly, Ixora . . .’
‘You know, properly. On one knee.’
He suddenly saw that she meant it. There was a feverish light in her eyes as she slowly pushed him down before her. And at that moment he realised that she was right, that this was the only thing that would keep them together.
‘Say the words. Four words.’ She ruffled his hair. ‘We don’t have to name a date.’
Suppose he did it. They’d face the bad times together, side by side as man and wife. She would be his forever.
‘Ixora—’ He tried to clear the dryness in his throat. ‘Will you – marry me?’
She clasped his hands together before them, arranging the pose like a photographer at a wedding. ‘Yes, John, I’ll marry you.’ She lowered her face to his. ‘From now on,’ she whispered, lightly biting his neck, ‘nothing will ever be able to harm us. Nothing at all.’
The tree had already begun to drop its needles. Helen crouched beneath the brittle branches with a dustpan and brush, cursing her decision to buy the damned thing in the first place. It had all been part of her attempt to keep up appearances, to make it seem as if everything was normal in the house. At the time it had seemed so necessary to prove that John’s departure had not upset their daily routine. Now that pretence was over.
Josh was hardly ever at the house, so Helen spent more time with her church group. She had been reluctant to mention the separation to her few friends at the advisory centre, for fear of the questions they would ask. But the truth had quickly been discovered, and her fellow parishioners had rallied on her side against John and husbands in general.
Outside, the sleet rattled across the windows like handfuls of hurled gravel. She emptied the dustpan and searched for something else to do, straightening the Christmas cards on the mantelpiece as she passed. Josh had just returned from Cesar’s house. She could hear him thumping around in the bathroom, washing before dinner.
This would be their first Christmas Eve alone. Her parents had moved to a retirement complex in Spain, and the thought of sitting with John’s family while they avoided mentioning their son was too grim to contemplate. That left an ailing grandmother in a home in Chichester, two weird cousins and an uncle no one in her family could stand. Some Christmas.
She wondered why she had not heard from John. Either he was delaying his decision until after the festivities, or he couldn’t bring himself to admit the truth; that he was happy where he was. Even so, it was odd that he hadn’t sent his son a gift. If it wasn’t for Josh’s efforts they would never have met for lunch.
Tonight, instead of wrapping presents and opening wine as they had in previous years, she would attend her church service alone, and, if necessary, pray for her husband’s soul. She plucked a silver ball from beneath the tree, where it had fallen from the dying branches. If John walked through the door this minute, she wondered if she would be able to resist taking him back. She despised his weakness, his falling for the oldest trick in the book. It was humiliating to have her desirability as a mate called into question. After lunching with John that first time in Camden Town, she had suddenly felt a desire to understand the enemy.
That afternoon she had watched Ixora from the garden of the house in Sloane Crescent. At first she could see only a shape drifting before the windows on the first floor. Then quite unexpectedly the front door had opened, and Helen had shifted into the darkness beneath the dripping hornbeams, scarcely daring to breathe as she waited for a first glimpse of the woman who had stolen her husband’s heart.
The figure that had emerged was tall and sinuous, moving as lightly as a feather, carried along by the winter gale.
Helen was shocked by the appearance of her rival. Keeping her distance, she had stepped into the road and watched in dismay until Ixora had turned the corner. The thought of John succumbing to someone so youthful and glamorous was shattering.
Yet there was something shameless and unhealthy about the woman. Lately, Helen had felt herself growing more susceptible to feelings of Godlessness in others, and she had sensed a kind of suffocating, harmful presence in Ixora. She knew that nothing good could come of their union, even if it was legitimised in church.
Bitterly, she recalled her own cheerless ceremony in a freezing registry office so many years ago, how she had listened to the truncated text with her head bowed, as if the simplicity of the service would reduce the sin and shame of her pregnancy.
Her mother, who could cite a dire warning for every occasion, had cautioned John that an elaborate wedding was the sign of a doomed marriage. Thank God, he had told her, that they’d decided against an ice sculpture for the reception buffet. She smiled at the memory.
‘I thought you said we were eating at eight.’
The silver tree ornament in her hand cracked, leaving a red hairline across her palm. She looked up to see Josh standing in the hallway drying his hair. His resemblance to his father was more in evidence each day.
‘There’s no need to creep around like that,’ she said, irritably brushing the shards from her hand into an ashtray. ‘They’ve forecast terrible weather. I didn’t think you’d make it back in time. You can lay the table. And try calling the cat again, will you? I can’t believe she’s outside in the rain.’
While she drained off the vegetables at the sink, Josh called to her from the dining room. ‘I was reading about this kind of thing. Male menopause. He’s proving his manhood, like when apes bang on their chests. That’s why he hasn’t called.’
‘And I’m supposed to take him back so that he can pull me around by my hair.’ She stood a colander under a saucepan and poured sprouts into it. ‘It’s not as if she kidnapped him, for Heaven’s sake. He’s an adult, capable of making his own decisions. He’s supposed to be sensible.’
‘I don’t think common sense has much to do with it,’ Josh called back. ‘It’s just chemistry, glands and hormones, like sap rising in—’
‘I get the picture, thank you,’ she snapped, lifting the filled plates and carrying them into the hallway.
The sudden plunge into darkness made her miss her footing and stumble across the threshold of the room, dropping both meals in the process.
‘Mum?’
Helen tried to rise from her knees, but the fiery pain in her ankle forced her down. Broken china surrounded her hands.
‘Josh, where are you?’
‘Over here, by the door. Are you all right?’
Slowly her eyes adjusted to the gloom. ‘I think so,’ she said, testing her ankle. ‘There are some candles in the drawer by the sink. Is the whole street out?’
Josh’s silhouette appeared at the window. She rose to her feet, keeping the weight from her sore ankle.
‘Next door’s dark. Perhaps it’s an electrical overload. Don’t move.’ He headed for the kitchen. Moments later she heard the drawer being opened. The silence of the dining room was broken by the sound of the storm gathering overhead. A faint yellow haze bled through the curtains from the street lamps beyond. Slowly she made her way to the window, leaning against the chairbacks as she went.
The street was rainswept and deserted. Above the house, the rising wind moaned through dark cables, shifting them from side to side. She could no longer hear Josh moving about in the kitchen. The house had suddenly become as silent as the dark, as if all sensation was being muffled, swallowed up. Helen peered out, cooling her forehead against the cold glass. Sleet was catching on the immaculate lawn of the house next door. The lurid array of coloured Christmas lights which framed their porch was now a string of rattling dead bulbs.
Suddenly the sight was replaced with a face, inches from the glass, crimson mouth formed wide in a shocked shrieking circle, whites displayed around surprised black pupils. Helen screamed and fell back from the window just as it exploded over her, showering heavy glass shards across the dining room table.
She crawled across the floor to the front wall of the room, heedless of the glass beneath her knees.
‘Josh! My God, where are you?’
Her hand touched something hot and fleshy lying on the floor. With a cry she recoiled. The cuprous smell of blood was on her fingers. She raised them in front of her eyes. There was blood everywhere. It was pumping from something right beside her, pooling around her legs. Confused and terrified, she began to cry.
A second pair of windows burst inwards, shattered in unison, glass fragments chiming and clattering to the carpet.
Josh had run back into the room. Suddenly his thin arms were around her, dragging her aside to an armchair. He dashed into the hall and threw the front door wide, halting before the felled pole which had brought the power line down into the side of the house. The cable fizzed and crackled against the wet earth, glittering with tiny blue sparks.
In the desecrated darkness, his mother cried out as she saw the shredded body of the creature that had been hurled into the room. The cat lay twisted on the floor, its back broken, its innards protruding. As the animal’s blood dripped from her hands, Helen began to shake, and her conviction that demonic forces were gathering about them began to develop an unbreakable grip.
She knelt before the flickering figure of Christ, her hands clasped in fervent prayer. The Christmas service had ended, and the church was now deserted. The verger was waiting beside the opened far doors. He could damned well wait, she thought. Her communion with God was more important. Although her wrenched ankle made walking difficult, she had insisted on attending church alone. Some prayers could not be shared.
The neighbours had wanted to call her a doctor, but she had refused the idea of medical attention. They were concerned for the welfare of her unborn child, they said, and the traumatic after-effects of shock. It was funny how they never spoke to her the rest of the year, except to complain about smoke from the barbeque drifting near their washing.
She had left Josh and the neighbours to nail chipboard across the broken windows. A team from the power company had appeared within the hour to shift the cables away from the house. They had been unable to promise restored electricity for Christmas Day. Everyone had been so quick to offer rational explanations. The storm had brought the pole down against the windows. The cat had been standing on one of the ledges. She had shivered and listened, unconvinced.
Now, as she knelt on cut knees before the garishly painted statue of the Lord, she prayed for forgivenness, not for herself, but for John. A bright, hard pain was beginning to burn within her swollen belly, a signifier that the gathering diabolic forces had tonight achieved their aim.
With a bitter wind moaning at her back, and the candles flickering smokily about her, she prayed for her husband’s divine deliverance. From Ixora. From evil.