By mid-afternoon she had finished, and she stood in Trixie’s bedroom, conscious of aching back and neck muscles, and feeling unpleasantly grubby, and also very hungry. People deserted by cheating husbands were supposed to lose their appetites and dwindle to mere shadows of their former selves, but Fran was not a die-away Victorian heroine or a twenty-first-century stick-thin model, and she was not going to stop eating just because she was getting divorced. And she had been carting boxes and books and clothes back and forth ever since breakfast and she had missed lunch.
She tipped the contents of some tinned soup into a saucepan to heat, and switched on the grill to make toast to go with it. While the grill was heating up, she looked through the photographs she had brought downstairs, trying to allot relationships to the faces. The slightly countrified woman standing in front of a nice old stone cottage might be Trixie’s mother, and the little group with 1950s hairstyles could be aunts. Were the dates right? Yes, near enough. There were one or two shots of a sturdy, somewhat belligerent-looking child whom Fran recognized after a moment as being Trixie herself. These had mostly been taken in gardens or on what looked like holidays on the coast.
But other than this there was not very much of interest. Fran turned over the last photograph in the envelope, thinking she would just label the whole thing as ‘Photographs’ and include it in the inventory for the unknown elderly aunt.
The last photograph was a postcard-size black-and-white shot taken against the background of some unidentifiable city. It showed a three-quarters view of a child around eight or nine years old, wearing a corduroy jacket. The child had deepset eyes and dark hair that flopped forward and there was something about the eyes that Francesca found slightly chilling. I wouldn’t like to meet you in a dark alley on a moonless night, thought Fran, and then took in the writing on the white strip along the bottom and instantly felt as if a giant, invisible hand had slammed into her stomach.
On the bottom of the photograph was written a single name and a date.
Alraune. 1949.
Francesca sat at the kitchen table for a long time, staring at the enigmatic face of the dark-eyed child, occasionally putting out a hand to touch the photograph’s surface, as if she could somehow absorb the past through her fingertips, or as if buried within the images might be a key that would unlock the past.
Eventually she took a square of glass from a framed print Trixie had had of a Tyrolean snow-scene, and laid it carefully over the photograph. At this point the smell of burning reminded her that the grill was still switched on and was blasting toast-flavoured heat into the kitchen, and she hastily switched it off. She was no longer in the least bit hungry, which was ridiculous, because Alraune – the child, the ghost, the legend – could have nothing whatsoever to do with her. You don’t affect me in the least, said Fran silently to Alraune’s enigmatic stare.
But the kitchen suddenly seemed cold and unfriendly, and Fran repressed a shiver and glanced uneasily towards the garden door. The top half was glass, so that she could see the outline of the thick laurel hedge between this house and the neighbour’s, and also the tubs of winter pansies that Trixie had planted because they made a nice splash of colour when everything else had died down and the dogs did not try to bury bones under them.