There was of course no voice of the sea from the shells. The sea voice was already faintly in the room.

Yet when Rachaela took the shells from her ear, a wave, a sound came.

Rachaela.

She heard her name on a whispered roar, as if the room, the stones of the walls, had spoken it out.

A stupid illusion. It startled her.

She put the shells down again. She thought of the stick of rock she had wanted because other children had them, and which the mother grudgingly bought her. ‘You’ll break your teeth.’ She thought of her mother, squashed into the wrong shape, lying in the coffin, dead as a door nail and patched with rouge.

The tears came out of her eyes again, as on the night before. She wept wildly for a few minutes, and ceased. That was goodbye then. To something.

Chapter Six

Now that she knew a way to the beach, she sometimes nerved herself to the slippy steps, and got down. She explored the limited cove, which at high tide the sea covered, leaving behind seaweeds, driftwood, a dead jelly fish, flotsam she could not identify.

Otherwise she kept up her arduous walks along the heath, tracking through the gorse and dry bracken, the rabbits fleeing before her and the gulls screeching overhead. She made herself walk, for sanity’s sake. She had nothing to do. It was all one long hypnotized holiday.

She walked the house too, trying to fix its angles and parabolas into some coherent plan, but it stayed a labyrinth, even where she could find her way through knowledge. She had begun to try the doors again, and once or twice found Scarabae under these stones: old Anita knitting at a red and violet window, the funeral of a king, Miriam and Unice sorting through huge albums of photographs, beneath a jade window—perhaps Jonah riding on the whale.

Miriam and Unice had drawn her in and shown her hundreds of the photographs until she was numbed. They revealed beautiful waxworks of men and women in bygone clothes, posed before scenery and palms in urns. There were no recent shots, nothing in colour. Rachaela found herself surprised the photographs had been able to catch the figures at all, for surely they must be as invisible as ghosts to the eye of a camera, just as, presumably, they did not reflect in their multi-ornamented mirrors.

One morning she breakfasted with Peter and Dorian in the morning room. They did not speak.

Once she met Alice flying through the house in a shawl like the mad White Queen, her quest unexplained.

She avoided Sylvian in the library, re-reading her own books.

She listened to her radio. There was a phase of opera she did not like. The human voice intruded on the music.