Killer

It was done now, she thought. Oxford, where the duplicity had seemed so adventurous, was far away, and Anchorage was coming ten miles closer every minute. Alaska, where she would meet the man whose assistant she would become, the man who thought she was called Elizabeth Edwards because that was how she had signed her letters to him, a man she loved but whom she hardly knew; a man whose every book she knew almost by heart; whose glowing career she had followed with eager eyes but from a series of great distances; a man she had not seen for nearly ten years: her father.

She stirred restlessly, her golden hair, tied severely back, catching the late sunlight and flaming into life. The heavy book on her lap fell open at the title page, and the stewardess, glancing down inquisitively on her way past, stopped for nearly a minute simply to read the title, and then moved on, still not understanding it:

FOOD IN THE ARCTIC

Observations upon some aspects of the cryobiology of Phytoplanktons in certain areas of the High Arctic – with special reference to the varying productivity of the genus Cosindodisus in the shallow coastal waters of the larger land-masses contingent thereupon. Lectures to the Royal Society, Summer 1970.

By C. J. Warren.

Memories of him washed over her. She had a habit of observing herself as clinically as she observed any plant specimen, and she knew and accepted how important he had been to her, and for all the wrong reasons.

The last time she had seen him, not counting television, was ten years ago, at her mother’s funeral. She had been called home from school just before the exams, which all of her friends had thought was the most super luck, to find her mother bedridden, almost mindless, and so wasted that her great beauty was lost forever. In her mind, Kate could see herself as though she were watching a film of someone else’s life, the colours too bright to be real, the emotions too vivid. She could see her mother’s huge cavernous room, its high ceiling crossed with beams, the long olive velvet curtains which reached to the floor, the deep red carpet, the beautiful, dark, indistinct paintings on the walls, a tall mahogany chiffonier full of leather-bound books, the great marble-framed fireplace, fire blazing, making everything golden, its crisp comforting crackling covering the sound of the wind against the windows. And against the wall, opposite the fire, the huge antique bed with the tiny figure of her mother lying in it, strangely immobile like a doll waiting in a child’s bed for the child to come and hold it. Kate could see the girl who was herself, tall for her age, willow-straight, hands clasped tightly before her, head high, golden hair loose and gleaming in the firelight, moving across the room, as though through a church. She had worn her green tartan kilt that day. What else, she was not sure; but she remembered the kilt quite clearly, and the big silver kilt-pin caught the firelight and gleamed in her memory. She saw herself, eyes full of tears, going over to the huge bed.

There was a smell, for some reason, of lavender; it had made her feel ill. Her mother had looked terrible, her face like a skull. It had given her nightmares for years, that face. She had kissed it but her mother hadn’t woken or even stirred, so Kate had gone out of the room again. She had existed, stunned, through the next week, under the forbidding wing of her mother’s elder sister who had come to run the house until Mother recovered, and who now found herself arranging a funeral instead.