September Starlings (78 page)

I finally faced my own past three days ago, went alone to see Tommo, the torturer from my youth. I had vowed never to come again, but for once, I needed this man. He is old, grey-faced beneath a clammy slick of sweat. He breathes with determination, as if he has to think about it. When I told him of Ben’s death, the cold eyes flickered with … was it triumph, hope, amusement? ‘How did he keep you away?’ I asked insistently, still dissatisfied with the previous answer. ‘You weren’t always so weak, and you swore many times that you’d catch up with me.’

‘Bother boys.’ He took a draught of oxygen, fought a cough for a moment or two. ‘He threatened me exactly as I’d threatened you. An eye for an eye, he called it. Ben Starling had some powerful connections, according to rumour. Not strictly big-time, but not kosher, either.’ He was sticking to the tale, then.

‘He … dealt with Nazis,’ I said softly. ‘He cleaned up after the war, brought Hitler’s small fry to justice.’ He didn’t kill, I kept saying to myself. Even if Ben did kill, I wouldn’t tell this man anything. ‘You would have been small fry, Tommo. Don’t get any ideas – he still has friends.’

‘Was he a Jew?’

I shrugged. ‘Partly. But not kosher.’

He dismissed the feeble play on words. ‘For a long time, I got visitors, big blokes who asked me whether I was being good.’

‘If you were being good, that must have been a new
experience for you. Even the worst of criminals wouldn’t commit fratricide.’

Pale hands gripped the arms of his chair. ‘Well, it started in bloody Genesis, Cain and Abel. And my so-called brother took you away from me.’

My hands itched to strike him. With an effort of will, I backed away from the sick man. ‘No. Your cruelty sent me away, Tommo. Frank was a good man, so was Ben.’

Since childhood, I have been capable of feeling something akin to hatred. My mother has not been a favourite, and I have loathed Bernard Thompson for many years. Yet I have never turned on either of them, not fully, not intentionally. For an endless time, I accepted abuse, tried not to care, simply shut out my mother, my first husband. Yet there I was, spending days planning to kill Ben if he didn’t begin to come out of his nightmares.

Oh Ben. I stood in the street, breathed fresher air into my lungs. I knew why. At last, I knew why my Ben had made me face the monster. He must have endured so much, especially during sleep, must have dreamt of Treblinka. He forced me to go to Tommo so that my nights would be peaceful. Ben made just that one mistake, forced me to sit with a lunatic, and even that one mistake was no error. Now, at last, I fear nothing, nobody.

As I drove away from Tommo’s house, I realized that love was the only emotion I had ever felt strongly. I loved Ben enough to kill him, had never hated sufficiently to strike out. Ben encouraged me to support Tommo, taught me to face the worst. Lately, I have learned so much about myself and about the wonderful stranger who became my second husband. (No, I haven’t forgotten you, Frank. You were the second, but you weren’t any more legal than euthanasia.)

While I prepare to release these birds, I find myself thinking about Mother, that unapproachable woman whose presence in my life has been less than comfortable. She is baffling just now, almost pleasant on occasion. Do people change as they grow older? Ben wrote that he and
his friends were seeking out men who had altered beyond recognition. My husband’s vigilantes were wreaking vengeance on people who no longer existed, folk who bore no resemblance to the guards who strutted, barked orders, played a part in the attempt to annihilate a whole ethnic group. Even the Nazis had metamorphosed once the climate had changed. Is Liza McNally softening? She is in my house now, is chain smoking via the gap beneath her black net veil. We are to go home, she says. Diana will become a trainee director, I shall play a leading role in my father’s dream.

Diana. Liddy. All Liddy and Jimmy’s children. If Diana leaves Liverpool, then the other members of her family will inherit a decent house, the place that’s being gutted at this very moment. Diana’s brothers and sisters will be able to sell the property, use the divided loot as a deposit on a future. How it all dovetails, how tidily it comes together, this latest chapter of my life.

Robert’s there, too, his grief about Carol revitalized by Ben’s passing. He has delegated his veterinary duties, is almost suave in a dark grey suit, black tie, very few dog hairs beyond those bequeathed to him this morning by Chewbacca. Mother was talking to him earlier, has probably elected him as my next husband. ‘You could be a vet in Bolton,’ I overheard her saying. All organized, all designed for me.

A jogger sprints by, the world shut out by a Walkman. Perhaps he and I share the same birth sign, though he has not read his stars this morning, is bent on being alone. Chewy chases him, throws up wads of grey sand, stops in his clumsy tracks when he gets no attention.

My children have come to Ben’s funeral. Jodie looks fairly smart in a blue suit, though the hem dips slightly at the back. She won’t sew. I’ve known her to use staples and sellotape to secure a drooping hem. She is working at last, has settled down to a job at Great Ormond Street. ‘Children,’ she announced this morning, ‘are the important ones.’ At least her priorities are an improvement on
her needlework. I wonder how she copes with sewing up a wound? There’s a man with her, no spots, good shoes, a qualification in psychology. I’m even smiling. It’ll take him a lifetime to analyse my mercurial daughter.

Gerald teeters on the brink of marriage, seems to be atoning for his sins by putting most dealing, inside or not, outside of his sphere. He is in the company of an elegant woman whose mother used to be somebody, a Lady-in-Waiting, I think Gerald said. They are forming a partnership to deal in antiquities and bric-a-brac from a posh
bijou
shop near Mayfair, a shoebox with a pretty frontage. They showed me the photos, enthused about the project. She’s forty if a day, talks around a gobful of marbles, is pseudo-aristocratic. I wonder about her previous liaisons. She has boys at Winchester, drives a 1939 MG, knows all there is to know about European porcelain.

Everything is working out smoothly, too evenly for me to believe. Even Edward has forgotten to sulk, though he wept when Ben was lowered into the ground. Ben understood, was one of the few older heterosexuals who truly accepted my younger son’s dilemma. Edward is alone, but he looks calm, so I guess that he has found a partner. Oh, I hope so. He needs monogamy, stability.

I made the decision to bring Ben home, was intent on following through the plan to talk to him, to read aloud the contents of the safe, to help him out of the maze one way or another. Heaton Lodge was not pleased by my mulish stubbornness. Susan Jenkinson, known in the trade as Jenks, visited me after my letter had been received by Matron. ‘You can’t cope with this, Laura,’ said Jenks, determination in the set of her jaw. ‘He’s started walking a bit, keeps trying to wander off. The poor man is very hard work. After the surgery and the breakdown, you’re not up to it.’

Diana was there, was ironing two of my T-shirts that she’d begged from me. ‘It’s her husband,’ she said rather peevishly. ‘She can do as she likes.’

I silenced my house guest with one of my hard looks. ‘He wants to be at home,’ I told Jenks. My collection of sleeping pills and tranquillizers was just behind the nurse’s head, in one of my famous kitchen cupboards which have never quite fitted. ‘He needs me,’ I told her firmly.

‘He needs professional care—’

‘He’ll get it. He’ll get whatever makes him feel better.’ Above all, he might achieve that final release from a life that was fast becoming a tragedy. ‘I’m well enough,’ I insisted. ‘And Diana will help me, I’m sure.’

‘Course I will.’ She stood like the Rock of Gibraltar, rigid and rather menacing, her hair plastered back into a thick rope that also looked carved from granite.

Jenks wheedled. ‘Just another month, then. Give yourself till mid-October, get some rest and build yourself up.’

‘No.’

When the nurse had left, I turned to my young friend. ‘I want you to go back to your father’s house for a few days when Ben comes home. Give me a chance to settle him while you bully the workmen.’

‘OK.’ She walked out, threw a parting shot over a slender shoulder. ‘Me mam told me you could be a stubborn owld bugger.’

I could have shouted ‘Ditto’, but I didn’t bother. Liddy often told me that her little Daisy was as determined as a constipated donkey. Sometimes, I really miss Liddy.

I stare at the horizon and miss a lot of people, my Ben most of all. He never did come home. In an hour of lucidity, my husband found his legs, walked to Matron’s office, prised off the lid of a locked medicine trolley and stole fifty-seven tablets. They were sure of the number, as all drugs were accounted for daily. I was told that the lid showed few signs of damage, and I was not surprised. Ben must have been clever to survive a camp, to plan with others a form of world-wide retribution that was never noticed. How stealthy they must have been, those avengers.

It was decided that Ben stole the tablets in the night, as nothing was discovered until the morning shift arrived. By 7 a.m., my lovely husband was cold in his bed. ‘If you hadn’t managed, I’d have done it for you, my darling,’ I say. He saved me from that, too, saved me from so much …

I look at the leaden sky, feel chilled beneath its cheerlessness. ‘Goodbye, my love,’ I say. ‘I don’t blame you for any of it.’ He’s better off, I keep telling myself. The world was not good enough for him, did not deserve a man of such magnificence.

Suddenly, I am not alone. A crowd of people descends on me, the approaching footfalls cushioned by wet sand. Diana and Jodie stand together, the spot-free young man behind them with Edward, Gerald and his probably Honourable fiancée. She looks better outside, younger, ordinary. Her hand is in my son’s and they are each with the right person. Ruth, who is short enough to hold Chewy’s collar without bending her knees, has taken charge of my wayward canine. Les supports my mother, has cupped a shovel-sized hand beneath the old woman’s elbow. And she is old, thin, wasting, weak. Confetti smiles, her still-pretty face wrinkling with age and too much soap.

Robert moves to my side, though there is nothing proprietorial about his stance. And bringing up the rear is my Frank, aged, bald, slightly bent. But Frank is dead and this is the man who sent Ben to me. Colin Thompson, whom I have not seen for many years, must have read about Ben’s death in the newspapers. My husband made quite a stir when he exited, though I shall not sue the nursing home for negligence. To Tommo’s dad, I mouth a soft ‘Hello’ that falls into a silence of two decades. My cousin Anne has joined Robert, is standing between me and him.

I bend, touch the catch on the cage. A movement nudges the corner of my vision, and I look up at the rails above the concrete steps. Although they don’t often
approach the beach, two starlings sit and stare at me. I won’t cry. Did you send them, Ben? Did you? How dowdy they look as winter approaches, how dull the beaks that were recently lighter, brighter.

From behind the gathering of people, a voice reaches me. ‘Give him his wings, Laura,’ says Kevin McCann. He stands with Danielle, watches as I open the cage.

They bolt from their prison in a flurry of feathers, beating the air wildly as they test mended quill and tendon. We seem to hold our collective breath while they keep together, soaring upward into a sky whose curtain has opened for them. A single ray of light touches the birds, making them ethereal, angelic.

Mother sniffs meaningfully. ‘Walking on sand is no good for a person of my age,’ she says. A narrow, gloved hand reaches up, pulls the veil over emotions I didn’t know she had. ‘Well,’ she says impatiently, ‘he was another fool of a man, but a good enough fool.’ Having framed the epitaph, she allows Les to steer her homeward.

I swivel, look at the rail, find it empty. The September Starlings have gone home.

Ruth Hamilton was born in Bolton and has spent most of her life in Lancashire. Her previous novels,
A Whisper to the Living, With Love From Ma Maguire
,
Nest of Sorrows
,
Billy London’s Girls
and
Spinning Jenny
are also published by Corgi Books and she is a national bestseller. She has written a six-part television series and over forty children’s programmes for independent television.

Ruth Hamilton now lives in Liverpool with her family.