Naomi's Room by Jonathan Aycliffe Page B

though I was feeling what that other person was feeling. As though I was the one who wanted to commit murder. Terrible that! An ugly sensation. But the worst thing was that I didn’t feel brutal, not at all. I felt exhilarated at first. Buoyed up. Then I felt bleak as though I had a depression on me. There was anger in me, but controlled, very controlled. And it was growing in me every second I stayed up there.’ He looked up. ‘I might have killed you if we’d stayed longer.’
    ‘Surely not.’ But I looked more closely at his normally gentle face and understood that he was right. And I remembered the moment, just as Laura and I had left the attic several days earlier, before I turned to lock the door, when a wave of anger had washed over me and I had almost struck her.
    I did not tell Lewis that. I kept it to myself. As though I wanted it to remain a secret, the way you harbour a sexual fantasy or a foolish hope.
    It’s past midnight now. The clock chimed a moment ago. I wind it once a week, it is one of my few regular habits, one of the few hangovers from my past. It is of Art Nouveau design, shaped a little like an Egyptian pylon, thick at the base, tapering as it comes to the top, where it is square with a projecting board. The face is round and made of brass, with fine numbers engraved on it in black. It is smaller than a grandfather clock, with a large pendulum of wood and brass that gets through the seconds with great despatch: a thrusting, impatient clock. Naomi was forbidden to play with it, though the swing of its pendulum used to fascinate her when she was very small.
    Sometimes it stops. It is always bad when it stops, as though ordinary time were somehow dislodged and its place taken by another sort of time. Their time. Perhaps that is why I am so punctilious about winding it.
    The house is silent for once. I have all the photographs in front of me, though I hardly need them now, they can show me nothing I have not seen more directly, with my own eyes. If I get through tonight, if the clock does not stop ticking, I will go to church tomorrow and request an exorcism. It has been too long, far too long. But will they grant me an exorcism? Without confession, nothing will prove effective. He will want a confession, the keen young priest they have put in charge of the parish since last year. I know him, he will do nothing without it. Is it possible I could steel myself to that? After all this time? I hardly think so, and yet . . . this silence presages something. The ticking of the clock seems very uncertain tonight.
    Lewis telephoned that night about nine. I think he had been drinking, though he was not so much drunk as frightened. He had developed the photographs.
    Laura had come home hours before. We were sitting together in the living room, reading, pretending life was normal. She was sorting through slides of paintings from the Fitzwilliam, early Italian works from the trecento, triptychs full of red and gleaming gold. They had given her her old job back, she was due to start in a fortnight. I was reading Margery Kempe’s tedious diary in preparation for a seminar. I too planned to go back to work the following week. Laura’s face was half in shadow, half in light. I could not read her expression. Most of the time, there was no expression to read. Not even light and shadow can bring life to a blank face.
    ‘What have you found?’ I asked. ‘Is there anything?’
    ‘I can’t tell you over the phone,’ he said. He sounded nervous. ‘I’ve got to come down again.’
    ‘What is it? You sound . . .’ I could not say ‘frightened’, Laura might hear. ‘You sound distressed,’ I finished lamely.
    ‘Jesus, man, I’m frightened is what I am. It’s the photographs from the attic, the ones I took this afternoon. You don’t know what you have up there. Those footsteps your wife says she heard – they were real all right. Thank God you never went up that time. Take my advice, man, and get