squirrels." There were still moments when she glimpsed that innocent child in him, however hard he worked at denying it, and she thought it might be the basis of some of how he grew up, particularly if she didn't draw his resentful attention to it. There would be no growing up for Harmony Duke, no protracted clumsy adolescence. Leslie imagined Mrs. Duke calling Harmony's name into the growing dark, her voice turning harsh with rage that perhaps had given way to panic—she imagined calling Ian's name like that, and closed down her thoughts. As soon as she'd washed up her dinner things she walked no faster than she ordinarily would out of the kitchen, and kept her back to the darkness as the glow of the tube fluttered and died and the Bach danced itself to an end.
The compact disc lingered over the echo before halting with a faint whir. The abrupt silence, broken only by a whisper of movement in the kitchen—the contraction of the glass tube—caught her wondering what to do next. There was no use wishing she'd accepted Melinda's invitation to join her and her partner for a night on the town, not when Leslie wouldn't have known until she joined them how the girlfriend might feel about it. Time to watch one of her films Ian couldn't stand while she had the opportunity, and she turned off the compact disc player before slipping Meet Me in St. Louis into the video recorder.
She was able to lose herself in the film: the soft bright nostalgia, the colours more vivid than life, the sense of a family as close as surely some families were, the studio allowing Judy Garland to act her age at last, the seasons passing fast as a dream of a year... Winter came, and she found her head sinking in time with the large soft monotonous snowflakes, and started awake with a breathless impression that there was a lost child in the house.
Little Margaret O'Brien was smashing a family of snow people to bits because she and her family were about to move away from their home, but Leslie's impression seemed more real than the film, and perhaps as near as the unlit hall. She was holding her breath and straining her senses when the phone shrilled in the hall.
As it repeated itself she clutched at the remote control to pause the image on the screen. In the midst of the pale crumbling figures the little girl trembled—eager to be released from her unnatural stasis—as Leslie snatched the door open. The light from the room framed the lower half of the stairs and the phone on the table ahead of them, and helped her reach for the switch of the hall light, which drove the darkness back into the kitchen, where the concrete floor gleamed like exposed bone. Now she was fully awake, and as she lifted the receiver her sense of any presence other than herself was extinguished. "Leslie Ames," she said. "Hello?"
Several breaths invaded her ear before they admitted to having a voice—a man's, so far as she could judge. It didn't speak, only hummed a simple tune over and over, until she recognised that the low repetitive sound belonged to a lullaby. With it came the rhythmic noise of some kind of improvised percussion instrument held close to the phone, the kind of item someone might make to amuse a child: she thought the caller might be shaking a handful of small hard objects in his fist. She'd asked him several times who he was, and once what he wanted, when he expelled a breath in her ear and was gone.
She cut off the droning of the dead line and bent a fingernail against the digits that would identify the caller's number. When a recorded voice informed her that he had withheld it, she silenced the message and stared almost blindly down the hall. There was no point in pretending not to wish that soon she would have more company in the house.
TEN
"You're right," Melinda said. "He's watching us." Two red double-decker buses cruised by, close together as elephants on parade. Once they'd passed, the man was still staring fiercely across Oxford Street at the
The compact disc lingered over the echo before halting with a faint whir. The abrupt silence, broken only by a whisper of movement in the kitchen—the contraction of the glass tube—caught her wondering what to do next. There was no use wishing she'd accepted Melinda's invitation to join her and her partner for a night on the town, not when Leslie wouldn't have known until she joined them how the girlfriend might feel about it. Time to watch one of her films Ian couldn't stand while she had the opportunity, and she turned off the compact disc player before slipping Meet Me in St. Louis into the video recorder.
She was able to lose herself in the film: the soft bright nostalgia, the colours more vivid than life, the sense of a family as close as surely some families were, the studio allowing Judy Garland to act her age at last, the seasons passing fast as a dream of a year... Winter came, and she found her head sinking in time with the large soft monotonous snowflakes, and started awake with a breathless impression that there was a lost child in the house.
Little Margaret O'Brien was smashing a family of snow people to bits because she and her family were about to move away from their home, but Leslie's impression seemed more real than the film, and perhaps as near as the unlit hall. She was holding her breath and straining her senses when the phone shrilled in the hall.
As it repeated itself she clutched at the remote control to pause the image on the screen. In the midst of the pale crumbling figures the little girl trembled—eager to be released from her unnatural stasis—as Leslie snatched the door open. The light from the room framed the lower half of the stairs and the phone on the table ahead of them, and helped her reach for the switch of the hall light, which drove the darkness back into the kitchen, where the concrete floor gleamed like exposed bone. Now she was fully awake, and as she lifted the receiver her sense of any presence other than herself was extinguished. "Leslie Ames," she said. "Hello?"
Several breaths invaded her ear before they admitted to having a voice—a man's, so far as she could judge. It didn't speak, only hummed a simple tune over and over, until she recognised that the low repetitive sound belonged to a lullaby. With it came the rhythmic noise of some kind of improvised percussion instrument held close to the phone, the kind of item someone might make to amuse a child: she thought the caller might be shaking a handful of small hard objects in his fist. She'd asked him several times who he was, and once what he wanted, when he expelled a breath in her ear and was gone.
She cut off the droning of the dead line and bent a fingernail against the digits that would identify the caller's number. When a recorded voice informed her that he had withheld it, she silenced the message and stared almost blindly down the hall. There was no point in pretending not to wish that soon she would have more company in the house.
TEN
"You're right," Melinda said. "He's watching us." Two red double-decker buses cruised by, close together as elephants on parade. Once they'd passed, the man was still staring fiercely across Oxford Street at the
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