A Dark Dividing Read Free Page B

office in the Bloomsbury gallery. Simone loved this narrow sliver of a building, tucked away in a tiny London square, surrounded by small, smart PR companies, and hopeful new publishing houses, and unexpected bits of the University or the Museum that seemed to have become detached from their main buildings and taken up residence in convenient corners. The office was small because they had partitioned it off from the rest of the attic floor, wanting to keep as much gallery space as they could, but from up here you could see across rooftops and just glimpse a corner of the British Museum, a bit blurry because the windows of the house were the original ones and they had become wavy with age.
    Simone liked the scents of the house as well, which despite the renovations were still the scents of an earlier era. In the late 1800s and early 1900s Bloomsbury had been the fashionable place for what people called intellectuals—writers and painters and poets. There were times when she had the feeling that it might be possible to look through a chink somewhere and glimpse the house’s past, and see them all in their candlelit rooms, discussing and arguing and working—No, it would not have been candlelight by then, it would have been gaslight. Not quite so romantic.
    Still, it would be nice to trace the house’s history; Simone would love to know the kind of people who had lived here when it had been an ordinary private house. She and Angelica might set up a small display about it: they might even find some old photographs that could be restored. Would Harry Fitzglen have access to old newspaper archives and photographic agencies? Could Angelica be asked to sound him out about it? Angelica was enthusiastic about Thorne’s but the enthusiasm might not stretch to discussing marketing strategies with a new man.
    Simone studied Angelica covertly. Today she was wearing the newly acquired glasses with huge tortoise-shell-framed spectacles. She did not need them but they were part of her new image. Simone thought they made her look like a very sexy Oxford don; she thought only Angelica could have managed to look both sexy and studious at the same time, and she suddenly wanted to make a portrait photograph of her, to see if she could show both moods at the same time. Would Harry Fitzglen see these two aspects of Angelica when he took her out, and if so which one would he prefer? He would prefer the sexy side, of course. Men always did.
    Or would he? He had been far more intelligent than he had let on at the opening and much more perceptive; Simone had known that almost straight off. Even without that Shakespeare quote about bad dreams he had seen the darkness within Mortmain, although anyone with halfway normal eyesight would probably have done so. But that question he had put about Simone herself seeing the darkness had put him in another category altogether because as far as she knew no one else had ever sensed the presence of darkness in her own mind.
    No one had ever known about the little girl who watched her.

    She had been four years old when she became aware of this inner darkness, and she had been a bit over five when she began to understand where it came from.
    The other little girl. The unseen, unheard child whom no one else could see or hear, but who lay coiled and invisible inside Simone’s mind. Simone did not know her name so she just called her the little girl.
    To begin with it had not been anything to be especially frightened or anxious about. Simone had not even known that other people did not have this invisible companion to talk to. And she quite liked having this other little girl around; she liked the sudden ruffling of her mind that meant the little girl was there, and she liked talking to her and listening to some of her stories which were really good. Simone liked stories; she liked people to read them out of books, although not everybody read them in the right way.
    Mother always read them in the right way. Simone