The Lake of Darkness Read Free

handsomely.
    The Frazers would return at any moment. That was of no importance provided Finn was out of Anne Blake’s flat. He closed her front door behind him. By now it was dark but Finn put no lights on. One of the skills in which he wastraining himself was that of seeing more adequately in the dark.
    The air was strangely clear for so mild an evening, the yellow and white lights sparkling, dimming a pale and lustreless moon. As Finn started the van he saw Mrs. lonides, dark, squat, dressed as always in black, cross the street and open the gate of the house he had just left. He drove down Dartmouth Park Hill, taking his place patiently in the traffic queueing at the lights by the tube.
    The house where Finn lived was a merchant’s mansion that had fallen on evil days almost from the first, and the first was a long time ago now. He climbed up through the house, up a wider staircase than the one in Modena Road. Music came from behind doors, and voices and cooking smells and the smell of cannabis smoked in a little white-clay pipe. He passed the door of his own room and went on up. At the top he knocked once at the first door and passed without waiting into the room.
    It was a room, not a flat, though a large one, and it had been partitioned off into small sections-living room, bedroom, kitchen. Finn had put up two of the partitions himself. You entered by way of the kitchen, which was a miracle of shelving and the stowing of things on top of other things and of squeezing a quart into a pint pot. In the living room, nine feet by eight, where a thousand little knick-knacks of great worth and beauty to their owner were displayed upon surfaces and walls, where a gas fire burned, where a small green bird sat silent in a cage, was Lena consulting the pendulum.
    “Well,” said Finn, going up to her and taking her free hand. They never kissed. She smiled at him, a sweet vague smile as if she couldn’t quite see him or was seeing something beyond him. He sat down beside her.
    Finn could do nothing with the pendulum, but Lena had great ability with it just as she had with the divining rod. This was very likely one of the consequences of what thosepeople at the hospital called her schizophrenia. The pendulum was a glass bead suspended on a piece of cotton, and when Lena put it above her right hand it revolved clockwise and when she put it above her left hand it revolved widdershins. She had long since asked it to give her signs for yes and no, and she had noted these particular oscillations. The pendulum had just answered yes to some question which hadn’t been revealed to Finn, and Lena sighed.
    She was old to be his mother, a thin, transparent creature like a dead leaf or a shell that has been worn away by the action of the sea. Finn thought sometimes that he could see the light through her. Her eyes were like his but milder, and her hair which had been as fair as his had reverted to its original whiteness. She dressed herself from the many second-hand clothes shops in which the district abounded and derived as intense a pleasure from buying in them as a Hampstead woman might in South Molton Street. Mostly she was happy, though there were moments of terror. She believed herself to be a reincarnation of Madame Blavatsky, which the hospital had seized upon as a case-book delusion. Finn thought it was probably true.
    “Did you buy anything today?” he said.
    She hesitated. Her dawning smile was mischievous. It was as if she had a secret she could no longer keep to herself and she exclaimed with shining eyes, “It’s your birthday!”
    Finn nodded.
    “Did you think I’d forgotten? I
couldn’t.”
She was suddenly shy and she clasped her hands over the pendulum, looking down at them. “There’s something for you in that bag.”
    “Well, well,” said Finn.
    In the bag was a leather coat, black, long, double-breasted, shabby, scuffed, and lined with rotting silk. Finn put it on.
    “Well,” he said. “Well!” It was like