When shall we three meet again? I said to myself, and I laughed aloud, uncontrollably, as if in recollection of some wild and ridiculous farce.

Then a depression, as abrupt as the hilarity, seized me, and I was close to tears, the image of the crystal blurring before my eyes. I was afraid, disorientated and without memory of what had frightened me, looking into the clouded surface of the crystal and trembling.

Scheherazade was singing gently, almost idly under her breath:

‘Aux marches du palais…

Aux marches du palais…

’Y a une si belle fille, lonlà…

’Y a une si belle fille…’

I tried to stop myself from falling out of my body towards the crystal, but the pull was too strong. I could no longer feel my limbs, no longer see beyond the clouded surface where, at last, some of the cloud was beginning to disperse. Scheherazade was singing softly in a rhythmic, lilting voice, three notes rising and falling compulsively. As I followed the coaxing beat I found myself leaving my body without effort, my senses warping, spiralling out of control. I allowed myself to drift, guided by the sound, and was conscious of drifting through the darkness right out of the tent and high into the air like a child’s balloon.

From far away I heard Scheherazade’s voice, gently coaxing: ‘Shh, sshhh…that’s right. See the balloons. Watch the balloons.’

Vaguely I wondered how she could have known what I had been thinking, then remembered, with a childish, absurd delight: she was Scheherazade, Princess of the Mystic East. I giggled.

‘Sleep, little girl,’ she whispered. ‘It’s your birthday, and there will be balloons, I promise. Can you see them?’

They were drifting around me, all colours, shining in the sun. I nodded. From a great distance I heard my voice in sleepy reply.

I saw the tent from above, saw Mose sitting on his stump, heard the pedlars selling their wares.

‘Hot gin’erbread’ and ‘Ribbons and bows’ and ‘Liquorice laces’. I smelled the mingled confusion of hot pies, candyfloss and animals. I hovered, directionless, for a few moments like some fairy-tale sky-ship, then I felt myself being drawn gently down towards a scarlet tent across which was stretched a banner which read: ‘happy birthday marta’. All around the banner were strings of balloons, and I thought I could hear music from inside the tent, the music of a barrel-organ, or maybe a child’s clockwork toy. I began to float down towards the tent.

As I touched the ground I realized that the sun had disappeared. It was cold, and the bright banner had vanished; in its place I saw a small, tattered poster, advertising:

The Gallery of the Grotesque!

A most Admirable Display of

Murderers, Monsters

and Freaks of Nature Depicted in Wax

I felt myself moving towards the tent-flap, my elation dimming rapidly. I had begun to feel cold, with a dull, sickly chill which pulled me from my delightful dream of flying into an earthy darkness. I saw the tent-flap open by itself and, although I struggled, I was not able to escape the malignant attraction of that opening. I could smell stale straw, kept for too long out of the sunlight, the musty reek of damp old clothes and the sharp scent of wax; and as I entered the tent, and my eyesight began to adjust to the darkness, I saw that I was alone and that all around the sides of the tent-which now seemed very much larger than I had first thought-were placed wooden pens or enclosures, housing the life-sized exhibits. I wondered why I had felt such a sensation of dread as I first entered; these figures were wax, their limbs held together with horsehair and whalebone, their clothes glued on to their bodies. The blood was red paint; even the gallows in the famous hanging scene had never been used for a real execution. But I was suddenly convinced that they were all real, that Burke and Hare in the corner were waiting there just for me, assessing me greedily from under thin masks of wax…

I moved backwards, angry at myself and my childish, unreasoning terror, and cried out aloud as I ran straight into the exhibit at my back. Even in my discorporate state I felt a moment’s tension as I touched the wood of the pen, and I whipped round to face the thing behind me. An enclosure of wire and planks surrounded a still scene; tacked on to the wood was a sign which read:

THE HERMIT

Please do not touch the exhibits

I moved a little closer, squinting against the troubling light, and saw that the scene was a tiny bedroom, like a child’s, with a narrow bed covered with a patchwork quilt, a small stool, bedside table and a couple of coloured prints of the type I had had when I was a girl. There were flowers on the bedside table, marigolds in a glass jar, and by the bed a small stack of wrapped presents. Beside the open window a bunch of balloons swayed in the draught.

But why had I thought it was dark? The light was streaming in from the window on to the bare floorboards; evening light which reflected a warm rosy radiance on to the bright little room. A man was sitting on the side of the bed, no doubt to say goodnight to his little girl, who was in her nightdress, a stuffed toy frozen in one hand. She looked about ten, long black hair hanging down dead straight around a solemn, pointed face. The man’s face I could not see, as he had his back to me, but I could guess at a certain heaviness of build, a square jawline, a stiffness in the posture which I found faintly familiar. I moved forwards curiously, wondering vaguely why this comfortable domestic scene had been included in the Gallery of the Grotesque.

As I moved, the girl’s head snapped towards me and I jumped back with a stifled scream. The girl froze again, her eyes fixing me with a stare so intense that I found it difficult to believe she was merely a thing of wax and horsehair. Reluctantly I stepped forwards again, angry at myself for having been startled so by a piece of machinery; at the London Waxworks there had been similar devices, triggered by pressure on a plate in the floor, enabling the exhibits to move as the onlookers passed by. I found myself scanning the floor for the concealed plate.

There! As I passed a certain point she moved again, turning her head towards the man with a fluid, boneless movement that could surely not be mechanical. Her hair fell across her face and she brushed it back with a nervous little gesture, the other hand clenching at the thick cotton of the nightgown. I was suddenly convinced that despite the misleading term ‘exhibit’ these were real actors, playing out some ghastly charade for my benefit, and I was suddenly angry at my nervousness, angry but, at the same time, filled with a dreadful sense of predestination. I knew what I was about to see as if it were a memory from my own past and, impelled with a growing sense of urgency, I touched the wire which separated me from the scene and called urgently to the child.

‘Little girl!’

The child did not react but moved warily towards the bed. I raised my voice.

‘Little girl! Come here!’ I heard my voice rise shrilly, but the child might as well have been clockwork. I tried to call again, but found myself moving instead right into the enclosure and into the scene. Suddenly I began to feel dizzy; half falling, I reached out towards the figure of the little girl as if to ask for help…

And I was ten once more, ten and coming to see my mother, as I did every Sunday. I loved my mother and wished I could be with her every day, but I knew it wasn’t possible; Mother had work to do, and didn’t want me in the way. I wondered what her work was. I liked Mother’s house, so grand and full of pretty things-elephant statues from India and hangings from Egypt and carpets from Persia, like in the Thousand and One Nights. When I was grown up, maybe I could come and live with Mother all the time, instead of at Aunt Emma’s-except that Aunt Emma wasn’t my aunt at all but a schoolteacher, and she didn’t like Mother very much. Not that she said anything, but I could tell from the funny face she used to pull when she said ‘your poor mother’, as if she had just swallowed cod-liver oil. Mother would never give me cod-liver oil. Instead she always let me eat at the table with her, instead of in the nursery with the babies, and there would be cake and jam and sometimes red wine with water in it.