‘So Hilary’s told you, then?’ Ivan asked.
‘She has, indeed she has. I am delighted. You must be so happy.’
‘I am, I really am,’ Ivan said. More earnestly he added, ‘You know, Dad, I’d never have believed the relief when I found out she really was. After all the worry, thinking perhaps I couldn’t—’
‘Oh, these things sometimes do just take their time,’ Stephen said in an airy, doctory way. ‘Nothing to worry about, usually. Now, the menus—’
‘No, but Dad, honestly,’ Ivan leaned forward confidingly, ‘the relief, after what we went through. You know, after Hilary got checked out last year and we thought we’d be fine. And then it still wasn’t happening and you remember what Christmas was like.’
Involuntarily Stephen glanced at Ivan’s bare forearms. The marks would not have disappeared, of course, and never would. Like the memory of last Christmas they had merely receded, taking their places among the crisscrossing scars of twenty years of self-harm. Every crisis that Ivan had encountered or engineered since he was fifteen had provoked in him a compulsion to take a knife and make slow slashes into his own flesh, sometimes dozens of little slicings up his arms and legs. He did it as carefully and deliberately as a butcher scoring a piece of pork for crackling, except that this flesh was living, and his own. It bled, and it hurt. Stephen did not begin to understand it, nor could Ivan explain it beyond once admitting in a rare, lucid moment that he found some sense of release, a sort of peace, in watching his own blood run. After the first
time, just after Sylvia’s death, Stephen had thrown away every razor-blade in the house and grown a beard. The second time Ivan had used a kitchen knife. It was only after a particularly nasty session with scissors that Stephen had grasped that the availability of blades was not the issue. The cutting episodes were never in themselves life-threatening, unlike some of Ivan’s escapades with drugs, and Stephen had had to learn to be grateful for that.
‘Christmas Eve it was, when it got to me. All that newborn babe and “Away in a Manger” stuff. Remember, Dad?’ Stephen looked up. Could Ivan really imagine that he would forget? The midnight mass at Freshford, the frosty walk back to Ivan and Hilary’s house and the sight, barely ten minutes later, of his only son sobbing with pain in the bathroom doorway, blood running down both arms and poor, white-faced Hilary, holding the knife?
‘Of course I remember. Ivan—’
‘Maybe it was a blessing in disguise. Brought things to a head, because that was when I decided to have the sperm test, remember?’
‘Well, afterwards. After you’d been patched up, wasn’t it?’
‘And the test was fine, wasn’t it. Perfectly okay. No problem, the result said. Well, it’s August now. So I just want to say I’m sorry. It’s such a relief now she’s pregnant and I realise how difficult I must have been. How much you’ve both put up with.’
Stephen shrugged and smiled. ‘I don’t want you to think about that. You’ve got to think ahead. If you want to thank me, try putting all this kind of thing behind you.’ He nodded towards Ivan’s scarred arms. ‘Ivan, you’ll soon be a father. Hilary needs you, so will the baby. Please—don’t do it any more. Don’t do it to them.’
‘But it’s funny it took all this time, January to August, when we were trying so hard. I mean,
really
hard.’
Something in Stephen froze. While he was flattered that Ivan should speak to him so openly he did not want to hear about his son and daughter-in-law’s sex life and there was a confidentiality in Ivan’s lowered voice warning him that any minute he was going to be told how often they ‘did it’. And quite possibly when, where and how, unless he stopped him.
‘Oh I don’t think so,’ he said, a little gruffly. ‘Anything up to a year is good going. And of course Hilary—’
‘Yes, Hilary. I was going to ask you something about Hilary.’
‘Right now? We need to do our patient progress updates, too. And there’s the Open Day on Friday—we need to talk about that. I’ve got a couple more for lunch.’
Ivan handed his father a sheet of paper from the pile he was carrying. ‘Yes, but I just want you to take a quick look at this. Hilary’s been taking the folic acid, of course, but now she’s pregnant we decided that a raw diet would be best for her, certainly for the first eight weeks or so. It’s the best time of year for it, the garden’s full to bursting with stuff. I thought it’d help with rejuvenation and cellbuilding, boost her immune system.’
Stephen scanned the sheet, nodding. ‘Very sound,’ he said, handing it back. ‘Excellent idea. Plenty of rest, too. It’s limiting, of course. Might be a bit hard to stick to.’
Ivan beamed. ‘That’s why I’m going to do it too. Just to keep her company.’
Stephen nodded again, with surprised pleasure. ‘Ivan, that’s a great plan.’ He hesitated. ‘Look, I’m not even sure I should say this, I try not to interfere. But I’m so pleased,
I don’t mean about the diet in itself, but because you’re doing this for her. Supporting her. She deserves it, the way she’s stuck by you.’
Ivan leaned forward and locked his father’s eyes in his own blue gaze. ‘Dad, I know. You’ve stuck by me, too. You and Hilary’ve been great.’
‘Well, that’s all right, Ivan. You know we just want—’
‘You actually met Hilary over my hospital bed, remember. That episode in Dundee.’
‘Of course I remember. That week we weren’t even sure you would survive. When you were capable of speech you accused everybody of trying to kill you, Hilary, me, the nurses, we were all in some plot together. Even the person in the next bed.’
The two men exchanged a glance and a smile. Could it be that they were silently agreeing that Ivan’s episodes might now be so far in the past that they could begin to pretend that there had been a funny side?
‘I remember thinking afterwards it wasn’t the way I wanted you to meet my future wife. Look, Dad, I’ve told Hilary this, too.’ Ivan leaned further forward. ‘I can’t rewrite the past. But from now on, things are going to be very, very different. I promise.’
Later, when Ivan got up to go, Stephen followed him to the door, where they lingered long enough for a sudden charge of panic to shoot between them like an electric bolt, in which each felt a fleeting dread that the other was going to hug him. They concealed the moment with an exchange of twinkly blue looks and a handshake, but after Ivan had gone Stephen returned to his chair and began to wonder if he might dare to hope that Ivan might at last have stopped breaking his heart. It was the habit of twenty years for
thoughts of Ivan to be shadowed by a sense of impotent pity, and the habit would be slow in taking its leave. He usually avoided any detailed recall of the blurred decade following Sylvia’s death but it swam over him again now, the amorphous mess of grief that they had somehow lived through, and which now left its stain only on undisciplined moments of introspection such as these. It seemed to him that he and Ivan had each sucked the other down, each pouring pain on to pain and grief on to grief until they were both half-mad with it. The struggle to free themselves of each other had been fought through twenty years of Ivan’s drugs and self-harm, false promises and dawns, twenty years of hysteria and dependence punctuated by silences and estrangement. It was a miracle that at last they had found the grace to forgive each other for their unconscious strivings to out-suffer each other. They had at last actually come together again as father and son, and even more closely than would ordinarily have been possible. The miracle-worker was Hilary.
Ivan had been a student in Dundee in 1986, going out of his mind for the fourth time since he was fifteen on a combination of drugs, alcohol and psychosis, although he had not been so far beyond reason six months earlier to fail to attach himself to Hilary, and it was she who had got him admitted to a hospital and contacted Stephen. Stephen, arriving when Ivan’s raving was at its height, had been calmed on finding a capable, warm-hearted woman at Ivan’s bedside, although in a passing way a little puzzled at what it was that Hilary herself was getting out of the liaison. Together, watching Ivan closely over the next two weeks as he had clambered back into his right mind, he and Hilary had grown close. She was a natural comforter. He saw how his son, just by looking at her, was made peaceful, and for that alone Stephen would
have loved her. But he did wonder if either of them was aware that Hilary must remind Ivan of his mother.
There was certainly a glimpse of Sylvia in Ivan’s new wife, more than a glimpse perhaps, in the dark hair that was always a little too thick and tousled for total respectability and in the large, full breasts that Stephen often had to stop himself from looking at, if not from thinking about. But Hilary’s lips which, like Sylvia’s, seemed designed for pleasure-seeking and also, although Stephen knew he should not think about that either, for pleasure-giving, were often pursed in vigilant self-discipline, as if her mouth disapproved of itself for being so sensual. After the wedding and as he got to know her better, Stephen began to understand that she placed a value on a quiet life for the three of them that was far greater than any ambition to be Ivan’s
grande passion
, and she was sufficiently content with achieving that to be unconcerned by any possible resemblance to the departed one. With slightly brutal practicality, Hilary had pointed out that it was Sylvia who was dead and she who’d got Ivan now, so it was, in every sense, up to her to make him happy.
Stephen had reassured her that she was not alone. She could rely on him to do anything that would bring about Ivan’s mental health and a lasting reconciliation, and from that moment had sprung the understanding that henceforth she and Stephen were benign co-conspirators in the arrangement of Ivan’s wellbeing. Stephen smiled in spite of himself. What a team they made. Ivan was happy now. He got up, replaced the three folders in their correct places in the filing cabinet and locked it. Then, and with only the very slightest sense that he was risking something, he picked up the telephone and dialled Sara Selkirk’s number.
W
E
J
APANESE,’ STARTED
Professor Takahashi’s interpreter, not realising that the phrase had become Andrew’s cue to stop listening. ‘We Japanese …’
Andrew turned to Professor Takahashi. ‘If you’re about to tell me again that you Japanese have an overwhelming sense of duty and responsibility to the family that transcends any consideration of personal gratification or desire, or if …’ Andrew sighed with weariness as the interpreter translated and Professor Takahashi nodded, ‘… you’re about to insist again that it is quite normal for a Japanese wife to do as her husband tells her, or expect him to discipline her, let me assure you that all that is quite understood. You cannot, I’m afraid, avoid answering questions with the claim that being Japanese places you above suspicion.’
Andrew continued to stare at Professor Takahashi’s face while the interpreter relayed all this, but it was difficult to know the effect it was having. Apart from a remarkable degree of tenacity in sticking to his original story, Professor Takahashi was displaying nothing other than a rather dignified, pained expression.
‘What I want to hear from you is,’ Andrew continued, ‘exactly what happened on Saturday 31 July. Again. Because, Mr Takahashi, I think you did meet your wife in Bath early that morning, despite what you say. And I also believe that you pushed her, or persuaded her to enter the side door of the Snake and Ladder and that in the corridor you knocked her head against the wall and then strangled her.’ He waited for the interpreter to rattle that lot back to him.
It was a stunt, of course, using the interpreter. Professor Takahashi’s English was well up to the demands of delivering lectures and answering questions. He had had no difficulty either in understanding or expressing himself during their first bungled interview, although the possibility that he might have had was of course another arrow in the defence’s nice fat quiver. Andrew was now being punctilious with every procedural nicety which meant that the interview room was rather crowded—with the suspect, the suspect’s solicitor, the suspect’s interpreter, the suspect’s consular representative, DS Bridger, and himself—and consequently stuffy, and everything was taking at least twice as long as it should. It was also proving impossible to question the man with the kind of vigor that might produce off-guard, truthful and useful answers, because direct questions were being not so much translated as transmuted, via the complex choreography of nods and bows that signified careful listening, into what sounded like rather coy social chit-chat. And Professor Takahashi, behaving like some goodwill ambassador at a cultural exchange seminar, seemed more anxious to expound on interesting differences between the Japanese and the rest of the world than to clear any suspicion that he was guilty of his wife’s murder.
Indeed he seemed embarrassed by Andrew’s directness. Andrew was convinced that Professor Takahashi’s show of finer feelings was another stunt.
‘My client has already answered that question,’ Debbie Trowbridge began, but Mr Takahashi interrupted with another volley at his interpreter.
‘Professor Takahashi repeats that he spoke to his wife on Friday evening by telephone and arranged to meet her at the Royal Photographic Society at 12.30. He did not arrange to meet her at the Snake and Ladder and has never been there. He waited for his wife at the Royal Photographic Society but she did not appear.’
Debbie Trowbridge said, with a look at Andrew that was not unsympathetic, ‘My client has cooperated fully with your enquiries, and I have advised him not to answer questions to which he has already given answers. Since you appear to have no further lines of enquiry I have to ask on what grounds you believe you should be allowed to carry on questioning him. Unless he is going to be charged, he must be released from all bail conditions.’
And as the interpreter spoke her words in Japanese back to the client who had, Andrew was certain, understood it perfectly well in English, he had to concede that what Debbie Trowbridge had said was perfectly and quite sickeningly correct. He exchanged a look with Bridger and felt any confidence that they would ever charge Takahashi recede even further. Bridger’s contribution so far to the inquiry had been to run up a telephone bill getting pally with the Kobe Police Department, following a hunch that Andrew considered spurious but which, in the absence of anything better to go on, he had allowed him to pursue. Bridger now surveyed Professor Takahashi with
what he clearly intended to be an expression of sardonic superiority.