The Deadly Space Between Read online

  ‘I don’t know what you thought you saw. The body we have recovered is almost unblemished. But we have identified him from his notebook and equipment, which you cannot possibly have seen.

  ‘Madame, je suis desolé, but neither you nor your son can have been his murderers. However convinced you are to the contrary. He has been dead for over two hundred years.

  ‘As you have been so distressed I have concealed your names from the journalists.

  ‘May I advise you to go home. Now go home!’

  His voice rose to an angry bark.

  We were whisked out of the pale cream rooms, past filing cabinets and photocopiers, and abandoned on the front steps.

  ‘What can we do? Where shall we go?’

  I heard my mother’s shriek as if she were hailing me from a great distance.

  I knew then that we would never escape from Roehm. To pass from a normal nature to him one must cross ‘the deadly space between’. And we had passed over that delicate snow bridge. He was in our blood, our bones. His hooded pale-grey gaze watched what we saw from behind our own eyes. Roehm had come back to us, brought us together in the hotel on the Bodensee, and withdrawn again. But his hand was stealthy at our backs. He was always there. We had become his creatures.

  * * *

  He had been watching me as I turned on the gas. He had followed me across the crowded ramps of Waterloo Station. He had sat beside me, all the way south to Konstanz on the padded blue seats of the electric train. He had watched over me while I slept, lulled by the insistent hiss. He was there on the ferry across the dark water. He had touched the woman’s back with my hands. He was present in my body when I entered her, his lips and mine were clamped to her unresisting breasts like a succubus. We were consuming her, inexorably, with our perverted desire, breaking down her body from within. And when her beauty was exhausted, I was next.

  The steep flight of steps sparkled with fresh snow. Someone had scraped a narrow path through the ice, which descended in a long curve, like a ballroom staircase on the set of an opera. The road before us was empty. On either side of the street, cars lay buried in the white drifts.

  ‘What can we do? Where shall we go?’

  My mother’s empty questions meant nothing to me any more. We stood dazzled by great slabs of blue and white light, hesitant before the graceful curving stair. Far above us the needle peaks glittered in the clear air. I looked down. The light exploded at our feet.

  Acknowledgements

  I wish to thank the following people and institutions for their help and support, financial and moral, while I was writing this novel. I worked at Ledig House in New York State and would like to thank David Knowles, the Executive Director, and the staff: Kathleen Triem, Peter Franck, Genevieve and Paris, Josie and Lauren, and all the other residents, who were there with me. Hawthornden Castle near Edinburgh in Scotland provided the ideal, silent setting for concentrated work and I am grateful to the Director, the Administrator, the Trustees and the staff at the Castle itself for the productive time I spent there.

  Thank you to my brother Richard Duncker, who was my guide in Chamonix, and to Alison Fell for her superb novel Mer de Glace, which I carried with me on the ice. Sheila Duncker is, as always, my first reader, but she is involved in every stage of my work and I am very grateful. Thank you to everyone at A. M. Heath and at Picador, especially Peter Straus, Nicholas Blake, Sara Fisher. Thank you, above all, to Victoria Hobbs.

  There are several deliberate quotations in this text from the most famous passages in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and from her 1831 Preface. They are to be found in Chapter 5 and Chapter 9. The Saints are based on the Protestant sect described in Patricia Beer’s autobiography of her childhood, Mrs Beer’s House, and on one occasion I have quoted her words verbatim.

  A Note on the Author

  PATRICIA DUNCKER is the author of five novels: Hallucinating Foucault (1996), winner of the McKitterick Prize and the Dillons First Fiction Award, James Miranda Barry (1999), The Deadly Space Between (2002), Miss Webster and Chérif (2006), shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize 2007. Her fifth novel, The Strange Case of the Composer and his Judge (Bloomsbury, 2010), was shortlisted for the CWA Golden Dagger award for the Best Crime Novel of the Year. She has published two collections of short fiction, Monsieur Shoushana’s Lemon Trees (1997), shortlisted for the Macmillan Silver Pen Award, and Seven Tales of Sex and Death (2003), all of which have been widely translated. Her critical work includes a collection of essays on writing, theory and contemporary literature, Writing on the Wall (2002). She is Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of Manchester.

  By the Same Author

  Fiction

  Hallucinating Foucault

  Monsieur Shoushana’s Lemon Trees

  James Miranda Barry

  Seven Tales of Sex and Death

  Miss Webster and Chérif

  The Strange Case of the Composer and His Judge

  Criticism

  Sisters and Strangers

  Writing on the Wall: Selected Essays

  Edited

  In and Out of Time

  Cancer through the Eyes of Ten Women (with Vicky Wilson)

  The Woman who Loved Cucumbers (with Janet Thomas)

  Mirror, Mirror (with Janet Thomas)

  Safe World Gone (with Janet Thomas)

  First published in 2002 by Picador

  This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  Copyright © 2002 by Patricia Duncker

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved

  You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise

  make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means

  (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying,

  printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the

  publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication

  may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages

  Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 36 Soho Square, London W1D 3QY

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 9781408824238

  www.bloomsbury.com/patriciaduncker

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