‘You’re afraid!’ she spat contemptuously. ‘You promise and promise…if thoughts were sins you’d be in Hell by now-but when it comes to one real action you simper and sigh like a girl! Do you think I wouldn’t do it? Do you?’

‘Marta…’ I pleaded.

Her rage was marvellous, all fire and poison.

‘Maa-rtaaa,’ she mocked cruelly. ‘Mmm-aaar-taaaa…’ Suddenly I was twelve again, in the schoolyard, my face pressed into the corner of the doorway, the taste of tears and hate in my mouth (cry-baby, cry-ba-aby, look at the ba-by cry…), and I felt my vision doubling briefly as the tears began to flicker down my cheeks. I could not comprehend her sudden cruelty. For some reason Marta was enraged.

‘Is that all you can do?’ she screamed bitterly. ‘Cry? I ask you to free yourself, to free me, and you stand there like a thwarted schoolboy? I wanted a man, a lover, and you give me nothing! I ask you for blood and you give me water!’

‘M…M-m…’ For a moment I almost said ‘Mother’. The snarl of wires in my mouth had become a broken harp, an Aeolian cavern of pain and confusion. I felt the left side of my face twitch uncontrollably, my eyelid a trapped butterfly beneath my tortured flesh.

Her contempt was too much to endure. I screamed with all the love and hate in my swollen heart. What words there were in my scream-if they were words-I do not know.

But there was a promise; relenting, she kissed me.

I am what I am.

As soon as I saw him leave Marta’s room and stumble downstairs, I knew our time had come. He had shed his brittle control, the icy, contemptuous mask of his respectability; and what remained had no features, no pretences, simply the stupid scream of tortured flesh and endless desire. The black, sleety wind carried him away like a drowned child, his eyes immense and wondering, so that for an instant I glimpsed the innocent he had once been…I never saw him again. Not in the way you could understand, anyway.

There was no dawn that morning, but at seven o’clock Mose emerged bleary-eyed from someone else’s bed demanding to see me. He came into the room without knocking, his hair over his eyes and his mouth wry. He looked tired and irritable, and I guessed that his head hurt, for he made straight for the brandy and poured himself a generous glass.

‘Why, Mose,’ I said lightly, ‘you look terrible. You really should look after yourself, my dear.’

Mose drained the glass and grimaced. ‘You’d know all about that, wouldn’t you, Fanny dearest?’ he retorted. ‘God knows what that bitch last night put into my drink, but I’ve got a blinding headache. And she had the cheek to charge me four guineas into the bargain!’

‘Last night you thought she was a charming girl,’ I reminded him gently.

‘Well, that was then. She didn’t look a day under forty this morning.’

‘Ingrate! Have some coffee.’ I smiled and poured. ‘All women are illusionists, you know.’

‘You’re all witches,’ he snapped, reaching for his cup. ‘You more than any of them, Fanny. So don’t start trying any of your charm on me this morning; I’m not in the mood.’ He drank for half a minute in sullen silence, then stood up abruptly, slamming his cup down on to the table so hard that I thought it might crack.

‘What is your game, anyway?’ he asked resentfully. ‘I’m tired of waiting, tired of staving off my creditors when I could be getting some money from all this. When are you going to stop playing games, you and Effie, and get down to business?’

‘Sit down, Mose,’ I said kindly.

‘I don’t want to,’ he snapped pettishly. ‘You must think I’m as half-witted as she is. What I want is an answer now. Otherwise, like it or not, I’ll do the whole thing on my own, and you and Effie won’t see a penny of Chester’s money. Understood?’

I sighed.

‘I see I’ll have to tell you,’ I said.

You have to understand that I was furious. I had nothing against either of them-not then, at least-I had waited as Fanny wanted me to wait, without asking any questions. But time was passing and I had had another call from one of my main creditors. As for Effie, I hadn’t spoken to her in weeks. I only saw her when she came to Crook Street and she was pale and listless, with the blank half-witted stare of the laudanum addict she was. Though I felt some contempt for her weakness, I sometimes also felt a pang of regret for the lovely, passionate creature she once was. She wrote to me a dozen times; her letters were desperate, violent and confused, her neat italic writing broken by paragraphs of jagged scrawlings I could hardly decipher. She dared not meet me. The day before I finally confronted Fanny I received a last message, shorter than the rest: a page torn from a schoolbook with no signature and no date. The writing was shapeless, like a child’s; my name headed the note in letters three inches tall:

Mose

God my love my love my love. It seems so long. Have I been ill? Can you remember? It seems I have slept, slept all my life away…and dreamed so many things. I dreamed I was dead, killed by Henry Chester and left in an attic full of clockwork toys. He says I’m mad…but his eyes are like tunnels. Sometimes I hear him at night, when everyone is asleep: I hear him talking. Mose? Do you love her too? Is that why you won’t meet me? Everyone loves her. Sometimes I think that I could die for love of her…my life for her, poor miserable life…but for you. You are my life. In the dim passageways of my sleeping memory you follow me-I hear your laughter. Your hand on my hair: I sleep for a hundred years. Dust settles on my eyelids. I grow old. She doesn’t care: she’ll wait for me. Will you? Sometimes I look into my face in the mirror and I wonder if she’s there waiting. Mose, stop me from sleeping.

When I was at Oxford I remember going to a party at some student’s rooms; a midnight, back-street affair with illicit brandy and a couple of horse-faced giggling girls from the far side of the town. I remember that someone suggested we try table-rapping and it was with a good deal of merriment that we set up a little coffee-table with chairs in a circle and the letters of the alphabet chalked around the outside. We dimmed the lights, the girls shrieking and the young men hooting with laughter as we settled down to the game. I knocked on the table as soon as the company fell silent, setting the whole cacophony off again.

At first the glass beneath our hands spun aimlessly on the table: cries of ‘Silence!’ interspersed the laughter and there were indignant cries to the supposed cheats in the party-all of us!

Then, seemingly of its own volition, the glass went flying across the table, spelling out ribald messages about members of the assembled gathering and causing a new outbreak of squealing from the drunken girls. I always had a fair hand at conjuring.

But then everything changed: my careful manoeuvre was aborted by some more skilled table-rapper. I sought to win back the glass, but it was wrenched from my hand and spun across the table with astounding accuracy. Irritated, I glanced at my partners across the table…and I swear, no-one was touching that glass. No-one.

Even then I knew that it was a trick: I didn’t believe in ghosts, nor do I to this day. But I never found out who the trickster was that night-I had thought my friends all too drunk, or too unimaginative, to carry off such sleight of hand-but the phrases which staggered across the coffee-table in that dark room fifteen years ago, the words which seared my brain in the minutes before my nerve broke and I kicked the table over…

I don’t know why I’m telling you this. But Effie’s slashed and fractured sentences and those desperate phrases against the table-top might have come from the same lost and broken heart: a voice from the dead.