In the Still of the Night Read online

  Table of Contents

  Also by Charlotte Lamb

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  The Sick Rose

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Also by Charlotte Lamb

  Walking in Darkness

  Deep And Silent Waters

  Treasons of the Heart

  Angel of Death

  About the Author

  Charlotte Lamb was Mills & Boon’s top-selling author. Her novels have been translated in many languages and are bestsellers around the world. She died in October 2000.

  IN THE STILL OF THE NIGHT

  Charlotte Lamb

  www.hodder.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 1995 by Signet

  A division of the Penguin Group

  This edition published in 2013 by Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Charlotte Lamb 1995

  The right of Charlotte Lamb to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

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

  eBook ISBN 978 1 444 77033 9

  Paperback ISBN 978 0 340 72867 3

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.hodder.co.uk

  THE SICK ROSE

  O rose, thou art sick!

  The invisible worm

  That flies in the night,

  In the howling storm,

  Has found out thy bed

  Of crimson joy,

  And his dark secret love

  Does thy life destroy.

  1

  Annie Lang stood in the wings waiting for her name to be called and trying to hide the fact that she was trembling and sweating, even though the stage-school theatre was unheated and draughty. She was the last in the long line of hopefuls who had queued there today. She had almost been too late.

  ‘Weren’t you told nine o’clock prompt?’ the man on the door had grumbled, ticking her name off a long list without actually looking at her.

  ‘Sorry, I …’ She was so nervous she started pulling a wisp of her pale blonde hair down to her mouth and chewing it: a childish habit that had always earnt her a slap from her mother.

  The stage-door keeper was in a bad temper; it was nearly opening time at the local pub and he needed a drink. ‘Never mind the excuses. You were told nine and I shouldn’t send you in there.’ She made an anguished noise; he gave her a quick look then grunted at her. ‘Oh, alright, alright. But you’re the last. Tell them that. Down the corridor, turn right, then left, and join the queue.’

  Pale and feeling sick, she followed his directions. She didn’t know this part of London. She lived on the other side of the city; London was a web of little villages whose inhabitants stayed on their own patch most of their lives. She had got lost within minutes of leaving the Underground station. She’d asked someone the way and been misdirected; panic-stricken, she had run round corners, asked in shops, had finally found the street by accident, turning into it, seeing the name on a sign on a wall, and feeling her body sag with sick relief.

  Now she was here and she wished she hadn’t come. There were a dozen people still waiting; she’d seen all the heads turn, had felt their eyes strip her, hard with rivalry and fear. One look and they had all smiled triumphantly, turning away again. She was no threat. Annie had almost turned and run then, seeing herself with their eyes. She had always hated looking in mirrors.

  She was wearing black leggings and a black T-shirt – so were several other girls, she noticed. Black made Annie look paler than ever, a thin, gawky girl with very big, very blue eyes – her one claim to attention. She wore no make-up because she had had eczema most of her life and any sort of cosmetics could trigger an attack. Her hair was long and straight, almost colourless, it was so blonde. She would have liked to have it all cut off, but her mother got hysterical if she so much as talked about it.

  What on earth had ever made her think she could ever make it in the theatre? Her dream was crazy; she didn’t even believe in it herself. She would never have had the nerve to apply, but her mother had stood over her while she filled in the application forms – had even her mother really believed she would get as far as an interview, though?

  ‘Is that the last one?’ she suddenly heard from the dark auditorium and realised the girl who had been in front of her had finished and gone.

  Annie hurried out on to the lit stage and almost stumbled over her own feet. ‘No, there’s me … please … Annie Lang … I’m the last.’

  A silence, and she peered out into shadows, could see nothing, then a small pencil light was switched on over a desk, and a man’s face came out of nowhere, gleaming eyes, a widow’s peak of hair, a full, moist red mouth.

  ‘Annie Lang? How old are you, Annie? You don’t look old enough to … were you on our list? Ah, here you are, got you. Still at school, Annie, right? Seventeen?’

  She nodded, dry-mouthed. His eyes were worse than those she had met in the queue. She felt his stare like ants under her skin.

  ‘Looks about twelve!’ she heard, from someone else – a woman’s voice.

  The man ignored that. ‘Tell us something about yourself, Annie. Have you done any acting at school?’

  ‘Yes,’ she whispered.

  ‘For instance?’

  For a second her mind went blank, she struggled to remember, hoping she didn’t look as stupid as she felt, then blurted out, ‘I … was J-Joan of …’

  There was faint, quickly smothered laughter somewhere in the seats around him, and she flinched.

  Her eyes, accustomed to the dark by then, picked out two other faces, both women, one who wore dangling, glittery earrings, the other wearing pearly lipstick which gave her the look of a phosphorescent marine creature, a decomposing brilliance.

  ‘Anything else?’ the man asked her.

  ‘The Diary of Anne Frank.’ She shouldn’t be here; she shouldn’t have come, she hated being laughed at.

  ‘You played …?’

  ‘Anne.’ She wished she was dead. Why … why … had she come?

  ‘How did you feel about the play?’

  ‘It …’

  ‘Did you enjoy it?’

  She gulped, then blurted out the truth. ‘I got so wound up, doing it, it gave me nightmares.’

  She felt their attention. A moment, then the man said, ‘Which of the Shakespeare pieces we suggested did you prepare?’

  ‘Ophelia.’

  The two women smiled again.

  ‘Why did you choose that?’ asked the man.

  She fought not to stammer, her hands screwed into balls. ‘It’s very d-dramatic.’ She could never get what she felt into words. How did you say: madness is terrifying, losing yourself is being sucked into a nightmare? She knew some
thing about it. She had loved her mother’s cousin Edie, who’d often looked after her when Annie was small; now the old lady was senile, didn’t know who she was or even where she was. Annie had only visited her a couple of times. She couldn’t bear to go again after that.

  Her class was studying Hamlet that year; its disturbing echoes of madness made her stomach clench. What if her mother … what if it was hereditary? What if she, herself, one day began to forget? How did it feel to be Auntie Edie? Did you know what was happening to you?

  ‘Begin, please,’ said the voice beyond the footlights, and she jumped back to the present, confused.

  She wasn’t going to remember the words. Her mind was a blank. She stared at the back of the theatre, where a little red light lit the Exit sign, trying to concentrate – and at last the first line came up out of the well of memory and then another and another.

  When she had finished there was a silence. It seemed a long time before the man said, ‘Thank you. What modern piece did you prepare?’

  ‘Look Back in Anger,’ she stammered. ‘The scene where …’

  ‘Fine, off you go,’ he interrupted, and she flushed with humiliation, realising he knew exactly which scene she would have picked, who she would be playing.

  But she couldn’t get out of it, she was there, standing in a blue light, on the bare stage, her knees knocking, feeling hopeless, feeling sick. What was the point of going on when she was bound to fail?

  It would be too humiliating to run away, though. She took a deep breath, and after a few words forgot herself in the pain of the woman she was pretending to be.

  Coming out of it, she was dazed for a second. The dark dazzled her. She heard breathing, then the light on the desk was switched off, and she heard seats banging back as the three people below stood up. They hadn’t said a word.

  She’d known she wasn’t going to get in. She wasn’t good enough. Why had she thought she could act?

  Turning away, shaking, icy cold, she stumbled off the stage to go back along the corridor to the stage door.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  They met her in the wings, three of them, the man the tallest, between two women, one of them with a very familiar face, an actress she had often seen on the stage of the National Theatre. The women smiled at her.

  ‘Well done. Enjoyed that. Must rush, Roger will talk to you. Bye.’ They looked at the man and said, ‘Bye, Roger,’ in voices that seemed teasing, or mocking, then they walked off.

  Annie began to follow them, muttering, ‘Well … thanks …’

  The man caught her arm. ‘I haven’t finished with you yet. One or two more questions. Come to my office.’ He urged her round the back of the stage. Annie dragged her feet, wanting now just to get away. It was so cold back here, cold and dusty. She found herself going through a door, into a corridor that led to an office with a name plate on the door.

  She read it as he waved her inside. Roger Keats, Senior Tutor.

  Her favourite poet was John Keats. She had a picture of him pinned up on the wall over her bed: a thin, pale, willowy young man with golden hair. Nothing like this man, with his fleshy mouth and those eyes that kept staring at her in a way that made her very uncomfortable.

  She looked away. He’d called this his office, but although it held a desk and filing cabinet, it looked too cosy to be an office. Lined with shelves of books, the walls hung with faded old prints of famous paintings, the room was dominated by a red velvet Victorian chaise-longue piled with cushions of many colours.

  Roger Keats shut the door and strolled forward. ‘We’ll let you know, in a week or so.’ He threw his clipboard, rustling with papers, on the desk, and lounged there, his hands gripping the edge of the desk, his stare wandering over her in that odd, smiling way. ‘I see from your application form that you sing, you’re in the school choir, and have had ballet lessons since you were four.’

  ‘Yes.’ She wasn’t good enough at either to think of making a career as a singer or a dancer, though.

  ‘Your posture is terrible. Hasn’t your ballet teacher tried to correct it?’ He took a leather-bound book off the shelves and put it on top of her head. It wobbled and was heavy. She grabbed for it before it fell.

  Mr Keats slapped her hand away. ‘Leave it. It should balance there if your posture is correct. Come on, head up, shoulders back. Don’t slouch. Let me see you walk towards that wall.’

  Annie walked, trying not to shake. Reaching the other side of the room, she turned to go back, but he blocked her way. Grabbing her shoulders, he pushed her up against the wall; the book fell to the floor with a crash and she jumped, eyes wide.

  He stared down into them. ‘Always be aware of your body, Annie,’ he softly said. ‘I am. Think about it now. Your head. Your neck, balancing your head on top of it, feel it, concentrate on it,’ he ran a hand up her nape and the little hairs on the back of her neck prickled unpleasantly. He pressed her backwards until she felt the wall forced into her spine. ‘I don’t ever want to see you stooping and hanging your head down again. Walk like a queen – and keep your stomach in …’ His hands released her shoulders and slithered downwards, making her nerves jump, making her stiffen, with a little gasp. His fleshy mouth smiled wider. ‘What sort of bra do you wear? Do you wear one?’ He squeezed as he asked. ‘Doesn’t feel as if you do, your breasts are small but soft. These little tiny buds are breasts, aren’t they? How old did you say you were? You have the breasts of a little girl.’

  He looked into her frightened eyes; his mouth was moist and very red. He smiled as if he enjoyed her fear. ‘Never mind, I like little girls. I like them very much.’ His fingers smoothed, pressed, dug into her.

  Frozen in panic like a rabbit in headlights she didn’t try to get away, just trembled.

  ‘There is a lot of competition to get in here, Annie, and we expect our students to work hard and do as they’re told. It’s up to you, Annie. We’ve seen fifty girls, all of them talented. To get in, a student has to have something special. I make the final decision – so, do you want a place here, or don’t you?’

  Annie lived in one of the older suburbs of London, South Park, on the wrong side of Regent’s Park. Her street was shady in summer with plane trees whose dappled bark gave a sleepy country air to the white and green Edwardian houses with their gables and pink roofs, and on warm evenings there was a heady scent of privet from every garden as you walked past. On very hot days flying ants swarmed from the sand below the paving stones and dive-bombed you as you walked over them, terrifying her when she was a child. Even today she panicked if an insect flew at her.

  The house had been left to Annie’s mother by her first husband, whose parents had bought it while it was still half-built in 1907, and had lived in it until they died.

  In those days this had been a very middle-class area, with servants sleeping in the attic and a horse and carriage stabled at the back of the house in a cobbled mews. Today there were no horses in the mews, although the cobbles remained; they gave class to the tiny, pastel-painted cottages where trendy, highly paid secretaries and city executives lived.

  By the time Annie was born the road had become shabby. Some of the houses were sub-divided into flats; the gardens were wildernesses. The sixties were in full swing and living was easy, except for women like her mother. Sometimes Annie felt her mother had been born middle-aged, always worrying, always working. From her first husband she had inherited a greengrocer’s shop just round the corner, as well as the house, but they had had no children. Annie suspected that that first marriage had not been happy, but her mother never talked about it. She only talked about Annie’s father, long since dead. Her mother still ran the greengrocer’s shop; it was their only source of income now and Annie was expected to help whenever she wasn’t at school or doing schoolwork.

  Her mother was back from the shop when she got home. The table in the long, shabbily furnished lounge was laid with a blue glass bowl of salad, a dish of cold meat and some cheese. The kettle wa
s boiling as she walked into the kitchen. Her mother looked round eagerly. ‘Well?’

  ‘They said they’ll write in about a week.’ Annie couldn’t look at her mother. If she told her … but she couldn’t tell. If she did, she would never get that place at drama school, she would never be an actress. Who would believe her? He was an important man there; the senior tutor – he’d just say she was making it all up, it would be her word against his, and who was she, after all? Just another stage-struck kid.

  ‘But how did it go? Did you think they liked you?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Annie mumbled. ‘I must go and wash.’ She rushed upstairs to the bathroom and was sick; her stomach was still churning as she splashed her face with cold water. She avoided seeing herself in the little mirror over the washbasin.

  ‘Did they like you?’ her mother had asked.

  ‘Be a good little girl and I’ll be pleased with you,’ he had said.

  Her stomach heaved again. ‘Do you want to be an actress?’ he had asked, his hands wandering up inside her top, his fingers hot on her cold skin. ‘Do you want a place at the school? How much do you want it? There are lots of others who would jump at the chance, Annie.’

  She closed her eyes and leaned on the wall. No, she could never tell. She hated the memory of what happened; it would be impossible to tell anyone about it, especially her mother.

  The letter came a week later. Her mother stood over her while she opened it. Annie’s hands trembled. She couldn’t see the words.

  ‘Well?’ Trudie Lang was too agitated to wait, she tried to read the letter over Annie’s shoulder. ‘Don’t just stand there reading it over and over – what does it say?’

  Saying nothing, Annie gave her the letter. What should she do? All those hopes and dreams of being an actress – she couldn’t give them up now. When she first applied, she hadn’t dared hope she would be accepted. Now she wasn’t sure she could go through with it. People always said, ‘You get nothing for nothing!’, but how could she bear to pay the price tag on her dream?