Return to Fourwinds (41 page)

He pulled her down to sit by him.

‘What is it?' She ducked her head slightly, bracing herself for what he was going to say.

He placed an arm round her shoulders. ‘There's something I have to tell you.'

She began to cry softly. ‘Who is she?'

‘What do you mean?'

‘You're seeing someone. Who?'

He pulled back. ‘But why would you think that? Alice, how could you think that?'

‘I know there's someone else, Ralph – someone your loyalty lies with, because it isn't me. I know that. Tell me her name.'

‘Alice, I promise you.' He had grabbed onto the tops of her arms. She saw a look of horror on his face. ‘There's no one else. No one.'

She shook her head, her eyes open wide to take in every detail of his expression, to read the truth. ‘Do you promise me?'

‘Of course I do. But I don't understand why you'd even think that.'

‘Because I never know. Because you never tell me what you're doing any more, what's in your head.'

‘Oh Alice.' He circled his arms round her back and pressed her against his mac. She let herself crumple against him, shaking with sobs.

It was a long while before she stopped crying. Eventually she sat straight and blew her nose. He placed a red notebook on her lap. ‘No more secrets.'

With a frown of incomprehension she opened it and began to read. After a couple of pages she skimmed more than read, but she got the gist. She stopped and looked up at him. Excited.

‘So Max was your father. Did you know that?'

‘I'm so sorry. Ma told me in a letter I received just after she died. I wanted you to know, but . . .' He stopped.

Alice stroked his face with her hand and sighed. ‘Oh Ralph. When I met Max at Lily's funeral, when I saw you both standing side by side, that was the first thing that struck me. Darling, it was hardly a secret.'

They talked for a long time. He showed her the important parts of the notebook. Read out passages. The whole of Max and Lily's secret life inside its pages.

Alice was aware that her hair was a mess, her nose red, but there wasn't time to think about that now. She took odds and ends from the fridge and the larder and they ate out in the garden, a late lunch, or an early supper. It was as if time had slipped, the cool of the dusk around them. The comforting warmth of her body at his side as they
sat and looked over the Dove plain, the glint of the river across the checkered fields.

‘What's got into you couple of love birds?' Nicky was back, walking across the lawn towards them, hands in his pockets, not shaven. He looked so tired in the fading light. His face slack, the expression rubbed away. Eyes without any real hope. Alice felt a stab through her heart then, because Nicky didn't have this. And she knew she'd been at fault. Hadn't she pushed at Sarah to get the wedding into shape? Pushed her away perhaps. Failed her. Just as she had failed Peter.

She bit her lips together. Well, not again. Not this time. Not if there was something she could do about it.

CHAPTER 32

Birmingham, 1981

Patricia woke too early, the sun sharp through the gap in the curtains, making her eyes feel sore. The phone was ringing. And immediately she was back in the same unfinished thought: a silent Sarah, so far away. What had happened to make her disappear and cut herself off so completely?

The phone carried on ringing, the day starting to crowd in. Someone with a question about the confirmation service that morning perhaps, about sandwiches in the church hall. She pulled herself up out of bed. Down in the hallway she picked up the phone. The clock on the wall said six o'clock. Who would phone at 6 a.m.?

And then she knew.

‘Sarah?'

‘Mum. I'm sorry. It's too early.'

The shock of hearing Sarah's voice again after so many weeks. ‘No, no, it's not too early.' Patricia could hear the hysteria in her own voice, bright sun on shattered glass. ‘Never too early.' The silence again. ‘Darling?'

‘It's just, I have to tell you now. If I don't do it now, I don't know if I can.'

Patricia thought: It can't be worse than what has already happened. She would look back and remember how she had stood with the phone in her hand and thought: At least we will understand what
has happened now. Things will begin to get better. We can begin to mend things.

She waited again in the silence, not wanting to scare Sarah away. She thought how Sarah's bones had felt so fragile when she hugged her shoulders as a child, a rabbit caught and held, waiting to flee.

‘Sweetheart?'

Sarah began to talk. The phone melted in Patricia's hand. She twisted it back into position, her hand filmed with greasy perspiration. Was she mishearing? Misunderstanding?

‘When? When?' she heard herself saying. She was aware that the hallway was buzzing loudly, or was it inside her head?

Sarah talked, haltingly, in bursts, Patricia still grasping to understand. The world had flipped over. Nothing was as it had been before. The one thing Patricia had known she had done well was to protect her child with great vigilance. Yes, with too much vigilance at times – she had known that – but it was a skill learned from hard experience, in the years after mum died. She had always been on the lookout for danger like a wolf sniffing the night air. She had learned what people were like, how men could be – in those days when she had been alone. And yet, in plain sight, in their own home, someone they trusted, someone they had loved and helped, had reached in a clawed hand and ripped the heart out of everything.

She was stunned. It wouldn't sink in.

‘But are you sure, Sarah?' she heard herself saying, stupidly, even as she knew it was true. ‘How?'

‘I'm going to put the phone down now, Mum.' Sarah's voice had gone slow and almost slurred, exhausted. ‘Tomorrow. I'll ring you tomorrow. Mum, you'll have to tell Dad. Please. I can't do it. And Mum. Will you tell Nicky? Tell his family. They'll let it all drop when they know.'

The line went blank. ‘Sarah? Sarah?' she called into the dull buzz.

She put the phone back, missed and settled it clumsily as if this was a new thing, to put a phone back in its cradle. She was standing in the hall; she was wearing a nightie, and her own child had been alone and frightened and assaulted as she slept in the same house. She hadn't seen it. She who had eyes for such things – because she knew, she knew the hard way – she had failed to see what was happening.

She thought of Cyril's sweet and boyish face, how he had blossomed with Peter's help, how good he was with the children, and she felt sick and hot with anger and disgust.

‘Who was it?' Peter was at the top of the stairs. There was stubble on his chin, grey in the early light from the hall window. In his pyjamas, his hair dishevelled, he looked suddenly frail: the old man he would become one day. She shook her head, no words yet, his face puzzled because she didn't reply. She went up the stairs, nearing him. At the top she took his hands in hers. She could smell the staleness of night on his breath. She was hollow inside, her stomach turning over.

‘It was Sarah.'

A gleam of hope in his eyes. ‘Why didn't you call me?'

‘Sarah wanted to tell us something. Something about Cyril.'

‘Cyril? About him taking the wedding? But I've already contacted him. Told him it's been cancelled.'

She sank down on the wide step of the half-landing, holding the newel post. ‘Are you all right?' he asked her. He crouched down beside her, concern in his face.

She felt her numb lips and tongue forming words. She heard the harsh, foreign words and she watched his face, his reactions, as if from a long way away. She watched the world open up in front of Peter and his startled tears; and they rocked together on the step, the chasm at their feet. Then he was up, treading back and forth along the hallway, furious. He slammed a fist into a door. She heard the wood
splintering. They stood looking at the damage in the sharp light of a summer morning. He was nursing his hand, a jagged dent in the door. He turned wide startled eyes on Patricia.

‘That was it. That was it. I told her Cyril could step in and take the service. She shivered – I saw her give a funny shake; I didn't know why – and then the next day she was gone.'

He thumped his hand into the door a second time.

‘Stop it.'

Patricia pulled him to her and put her arms round his arms. ‘I know. I want to kill him. But we've got the day to get through. The morning service. We'll get through that. And then we must sit down and try and work out what to do to help Sarah. That's all that matters now.' She paused. ‘Oh God.'

‘What?'

‘Alice rang yesterday. She's coming by this afternoon with Nicky to pick up a box of his things. I said I'd post it, but she insisted on coming.'

‘Today? They're coming today?'

She nodded.

He shut his eyes.

One thought going round and round in a loop in the front of the mind. In the kitchen she dropped a plate. Trying to pull out of the garage Peter forgot to put the car into reverse; she saw what was happening but couldn't stop it as the car bumper thumped into the wall. They sat, looking at the bricks, silent and frozen. Peter manhandled the gears clumsily and pulled out backwards into the driveway, paused to pull out into the road.

‘Stop,' said Patricia, her hand on his arm. ‘The veils. I forgot the veils.'

She ran back into the house and came out with a pile of ironed cloths with dangling tapes. Laid them on the back seat.

The church was full for the confirmation service. Peter stood on the threshold and tried to focus on the morning. The building felt like a place he had never seen before, its purpose obscure and ridiculous. He found the bishop already in the vestry, robing for the service, lifting a gold stole over the white surplice and gold robe, vestments from the high Roman church in the third century still worn almost two thousand years later. Why?

Through the doorway the children and teenagers were milling around, expectant and excited by the attention. Patricia handed out the veils to the girls, helped tie them under their hair at the back. The boys in white shirts, lining up in twos ready to go through into the service. Music from the organ pipes playing them in.

At the moment of confirmation Peter stood alongside the bishop, whispering the names of the children to him as they came forward in pairs to kneel and have hands laid on their heads, confirmed by the Holy Spirit. Seeing the large red hands, the white hairs on the backs of the fingers, lying on the head of a child, he felt his heart panic and skitter, the blood in his ears klaxonning danger, and he couldn't remember who the next children were, lost his place on the list, and the bishop waited, glanced over as Peter hunted through the names, the children's eyes puzzling up at him. There was cold sweat round his collar.

And later, lifting the communion cup to a woman's lips, he was shaking, shaking with anger. Anger with God. Standing in his priest's robes, holding out the comfort of the communion cup he understood for the first time the heft of no longer believing, how it felt to wait alone in a dark world after God had turned his back and left.

Disrobing in the vestry after the service, hanging his white surplice on a wire coat hanger, the silver damask stole draped round the empty
shoulders, he asked Bishop Fraser if he might stay for a word, before they joined the families for the lunch set out in the church hall: plates of sandwiches under cling-film wrap, the smell of cut cress and hardboiled eggs seeming to waft into his thoughts and make his empty stomach turn over with nausea. Peter closed the door and the bishop waited. The words in Peter's mouth were like hot coals. He felt small and shabby and foolish – and fearful, his head pounding. The bishop's friendly, pastoral demeanour had turned to concern.

‘Peter? Sit down, dear man. Are you ill? Patricia?'

He shook his head. His ears rang as if he had just registered the impact of an old blow.

‘It's Cyril.'

‘Canon Prior?'

Peter felt the chair take his weight as he thumped down. Heard the groan from his lungs. As clearly, as dispassionately as he could, Peter told him how Cyril had abused their trust. Several serious assaults on a child and later a rape. A string of death threats over several years to buy that child's silence. He watched the bishop's face, grave and stunned, disgust and disbelief passing over it like shadows.

Confidential. It would be confidential, the bishop told him. But there would be an enquiry. The police. And then they had to join the cheerful families in the church hall, the din of chatter and chinking teacups, and Patricia like an automaton sliding portions of damp quiche onto paper plates.

Going back in the car Patricia put her hand on his arm. ‘It will be all right, won't it? It will be all right? Sarah. In a way we can't see yet. It has to be.'

And he realised then that she was relying on his faith. She was coping, because she still believed that he would think like that.