Never Tell (43 page)

‘What, with my dear father? Hardly, Rose.’ He leaned back and looked up into the great dome. Into the void. ‘I live in a mission in Caracas most of the time. Occasionally I retreat to the family farm. My father wouldn’t have me, to be honest. Not here. Not any more.’ Dalziel looked so sad. So sad I had to turn away. ‘I wasn’t allowed near the kids. Far too untrustworthy. That was the deal.’

That bed in the hotel room was vivid in my mind now. The snowy pillows, the small dark head. ‘I suppose,’ I murmured, ‘I suppose that’s understandable.’

He looked at me. ‘Is that what you suppose, my lovely Rose?’

‘Well, you – you weren’t very well, were you?’

‘No, I wasn’t very well, for a long time. I …’ he paused. ‘I think I’m a little better now,’ he finished quietly. ‘I’ve certainly paid the price, I hope.’

‘Do you live alone?’

‘Yasmin comes to see me. She stays for weeks at a time, quite often. So it’s not all bad.’

Yasmin. The stepsister he had loved so much.

Dalziel, my tragic friend. Born into such privilege and wealth, given everything except proper love. Left with nothing but an empty life. The iconoclast turned conformist.

‘It’s nice to see you,’ he said quietly. ‘It really is, Rose. The girl with the sad mouth.’

The voices rose and swelled below us as we sat in silence. I thought of that cold October night so long ago, of the two of us running laughing from Oxford’s cathedral, trailing champagne and pink feathers, without a care in the world.

After a while, I slipped my hand into his cold one and we sat some more. We had come full circle, it seemed.

UNIVERSITY, CHRISTMAS 1991

Yea, he had power over the angel, and prevailed: he wept,
and made supplication unto Him
.

Hosea 12: 4

I had caught them together, although they didn’t know at the time. It was an icy December night just before we broke up for Christmas, and I’d bought Dalziel a present. I’d saved the rest of my grant and all my dad’s allowance, and travelled up to London specially to buy him a rare recording of Maria Callas that he’d told me about one night, and I was so proud of myself. Exhilarated, I rode my bike very fast from Magdalen to his house, almost falling on black ice by the Bodleian Library.

At Dalziel’s I rang the doorbell several times but he didn’t answer, though I could see light creeping round the curtain in the bedroom and when I peered through the letterbox, I could hear opera playing softly from somewhere. Dalziel was probably comatose on the sofa, or soaking in the bath. Leaning my bike against the front porch, I let myself through the side gate into the back garden.

They didn’t see me. They didn’t see me as I stood by the French windows and stared in; finally things began to fall into place: the reason the girl had been so angry with me in the pub the week before. The connection I had always felt between them; the tension, the look on his face when she wrapped herself so deliberately around another boy in front of him.

Drunk and naked, they lay entwined on a great white blanket on the floor before the fire, as if they had just made love. A great painting of an angel leaned against the wall, an angel apparently holding a man tenderly. Later I learned it was a Rembrandt, the angel wrestling with Jacob who was pleading for forgiveness for his sins.

And for a moment I was simply entranced by them, the pair on the rug in front of the fire, because they were beautiful together; his long slim body, her tiny slender frame, they were like something Biblical. Oh, the irony. And as she turned over, yawning and purring almost, I saw that her face was made up like the angel in the painting.

Dalziel stood now and stretched as she relit a joint. He wrapped a towel around his narrow hips and walked over to the fire, where I watched him take something from the mantelpiece. He tested it on his finger. I stepped nearer: realising with horror it was a knife – and she hadn’t seen it, that was obvious. For a moment I thought I would rap on the window to stop whatever he was about to do. But I saw she was smiling, sleepily, reaching up to him with peaceful languor.

He sat down again beside her and he took her hand and laid it in his lap. And as I watched, he began to carve something into her wrist: so tenderly he held her and the blood dripped on the white fur she lay on and when she winced a little, he lifted her arm to his mouth and sucked the blood away. And then he laid her down again and arranged the blanket beneath her until it looked like she was wearing wings, great white feathery wings that soared and arched behind her. And then he climbed over her, astride her, and leaned to kiss her.

You shall not make for yourself a carved image – any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth
.

I was freezing now, my fingers numb in the stinging cold.

I watched them for a minute more as they kissed slowly and then began to make love again – and I was jealous and I was moved. Eventually, I turned away, disturbed, and I pocketed the prettily wrapped CD of Maria Callas, and I cycled to James’s house instead. I craved company and human warmth, and I spent the night with him.

Later, I realised it was the second commandment Dalziel was breaking that night. Making and worshipping a carved image. The knife had fooled me at the time: later, I knew he wouldn’t have hurt her – he loved her too much. And the sex hadn’t shocked me, though it had stabbed me to the core, despite our own asexual relationship. But it shocked me later, when James told me, that night at the Randolph, that they were siblings. Stepsiblings, whatever. It seemed indecent somehow; dirty and spoiling the beauty I’d seen.

The day Dalziel finally went mad and tried to kill her little brother. The brother who was like a piece of Yasmin. Dalziel had loved her and he wasn’t allowed her – so he hurt himself instead. He turned himself slowly mad, I realised much later, through love of her.

Chapter Thirty-Nine
GLOUCESTERSHIRE,
SUMMER 2009

So heavenly love shall outdo hellish hate
.

Paradise Lost
, Milton

Summer came. Tractors traced lanes through the fields like finger-trails through sand. Rabbits sat, fat and free, birds rose in waves from the hedgerows beneath the sun.

We put the perfect house on the market. It was a beautiful family home, waiting for the right family. We just weren’t it. James went away on business: we didn’t talk, not really. It hung over us, but it wasn’t time – yet. Slowly I began to pack up.

A week or so after his release, I started to box up my books, and I found a copy of my university diary wedged between Coleridge and my Shakespeare’s Sonnets. I flicked through it, feeling unexpected tears flood my eyes. How much hope and how much expectation I’d had. How nearly it had ended in disaster.

‘Penny for them.’ James stood behind me. He’d arrived back from Paris that afternoon.

‘God you scared me.’ I turned quickly. He took the book from my hands; I pushed down the instinct to grab it straight back. Why did it matter if he read the ramblings of an eighteen-year-old, unsure whether she should carry on seeing him at all, secretly in love with his best friend? But James wasn’t interested in reading it anyway. He’d never really cared about my writing.

‘I’m sorry, Rose,’ he muttered, staring at the faded blue cover. It bore a yellow smiley-face sticker and my name doodled in biro round a badly drawn rose. ‘I’ve been an utter bastard. I’d –’ he looked up at me now – ‘I’d really love it if you could forgive me.’

‘For what exactly?’

‘For – everything.’ He gave the book back and slumped onto the sofa. ‘For hitting you, first and foremost.’

‘Oh.’

‘And for – for Kate.’

I thought of Danny. I hadn’t even felt guilty about him, I realised now. I’d felt a lot of things, but guilt wasn’t one of them.

‘Thank you,’ I said quietly. ‘Of course I can forgive you. I guess – I guess we haven’t been good for each other for a long time now.’

‘You must have been so pleased, the day I got banged up.’

‘Are you joking?’ I shook my head at him. ‘It was hideous.’

‘I didn’t do it, you know.’

‘Didn’t you?’ We stared at each other. I felt like I was slipping back into the yawning black hole. I had been so unsure of the truth for so long, I wasn’t sure I could bear it now.

‘Did you honestly think I had become a drug baron?’

This man I knew so well and yet didn’t know at all. I gazed at him in silence. Behind him on the wall a print of Lautrec’s cancan dancers kicked out their delicately heeled feet, faces mischievous, their skirts primrose-yellow froth. So much history - and yet …

‘Come on, Rose. Don’t act dumb. I thought …’ He trailed off.

‘What?’

‘I thought it was you that shopped me.’

‘James!’

‘I thought you were so angry, you wanted to shock me.’

‘Christ, James. Why would I want that?’ I felt wearied, a thousand years old. ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

But I saw myself tearing round his studio the day that I’d caught Liam there. I had doubted James severely, that was true. I’d pulled things down, I’d opened drawers, files, I’d gone through his emails. I’d sat numb and dazed, knowing my life no longer stacked up, and had assumed he was up to no good.

‘I thought about it, you know.’ He read my mind. ‘When they offered to cut me in on the deal; when they asked if I wanted to take over running one of their operations.’

I saw the vortex now; I saw my chance to climb back before I was sucked through for ever. This was the chance to scramble out. ‘So you were tempted?’

‘I was desperate.’

I put all the books down and sat on the sofa next to him. ‘Desperate?’

He put his head in his hands, staring at his feet. At the new carpet. ‘I’d fucked up so badly, financially. I was terrified. I panicked. For a moment I saw it as a quick fix.’

‘A quick fix?’

‘Do you have to keep bloody repeating me?’ James snapped. He stood and walked to the drinks cupboard, pulled a bottle of whiskey from the shelf.

‘Is that why you tried to blackmail Higham?’ I asked him drily.

He put the bottle down with a bang and swung to face me.

‘That wasn’t me.’ His forehead wrinkled into a deep frown. ‘That was Kate’s idea. Kate and Charlie. I swear.’

‘Did you know Dalziel was alive?’

He stared at me, his skin blanching. ‘Alive?’

‘Yes, J, alive.’

We hung over the lip of our life. The moment that finally cracked the final vestige of trust between us.

‘I had an idea,’ he muttered in the end.

‘I see.’

‘Only very recently, though, I swear. And I figured …’

‘What?’

‘He owed me.’

‘You? You specifically?’ I felt that familiar flicker of anger now. ‘Not all of us? Just you?’

‘It was me that thought I’d killed him. And it wasn’t my idea. It was Kate’s. She saw him, a few years ago apparently, off his face again.’

‘So she
was
a whore?’ I said coldly.

‘She was … let’s just say she was a good-time girl. Whatever. She was in love with Charlie Higham, and he had some kind of revenge up his sleeve. When Lord Higham appeared again – well, she knew Higham was struggling for political power. She did it all, I swear, Rosie.’ He grabbed my hand, my hand that suddenly felt terribly cold. ‘I swear it wasn’t me.’

‘And the heroin?’

‘I thought about it.’ He poured a few fingers of whiskey and downed the glass in one. ‘He made it sound so bloody easy.’

‘Who did?’

‘Kattan.’

‘But I still don’t understand. If it was him, if you knew he’d set you up, why didn’t you implicate him in the trial?’

‘They weren’t interested. They literally ignored me every time I mentioned his name. Jesus, Rose,’ he slumped again, his head in his hands, ‘I was just a pawn in something else.’

For the first time in a year, I realised I believed him. The relief I felt was immense. He was telling the truth. I put my arm around him, felt his solid warmth through his sweatshirt. I felt sorrow for what he’d endured; but most of all, I felt relief for our children, that their father had not veered as far off track as I’d feared.

‘I think he wanted me to go down.’ James stared at the wall. ‘But I don’t know why.’

‘Who did? Hadi Kattan?’

‘No.’ He gazed at me. ‘Not Hadi. Ash.’

In the end, who knew? Who knew whether the Kattans came to wreak revenge or whether they just happened to be in our path when we stumbled so clumsily across them? But Maya apparently recovered, and for that I was truly pleased. The photo in the paper at the Islamic protest; it turned out to be a photo taken from the wrong angle, an image from a set snapped by one of Xav’s staff photographers that proved Maya and Nadif were part of a peaceful protest all along – against the fundamentalists, not for.

Some time in the autumn I caught Maya’s appearance on Channel 4’s News, talking passionately against her brother’s involvement with Higham’s party.

‘No comment,’ said Ash Kattan icily, outside the House of Commons, pushing past the TV crew.

‘He is betraying himself,’ she said, back in the studio, and she seemed almost regal, and silently I cheered her. ‘Just like his father too.’

I began to accept the facts would never add up neatly. Life didn’t work that way. Not mine, anyway. I told James that I was leaving him; he wasn’t surprised. I rented a small cottage outside Stow-on-the-Wold. Alicia wouldn’t have to move school, and the twins would join her there in the autumn. James was going back to London, to stay with Liam until he’d sorted himself out. He’d keep a flat in Oxford, he said, and he’d see them in the week, after school; he paid half the rent on the cottage and that was fine by me. The children seemed largely accepting. They’d got so used to him not being around, and we’d managed to separate without the acrimony that could have ruined us all.