The Child's Child (34 page)

He was a big man with a loud voice, and her feeble shows of defiance resulting in his “That’s enough of that, my girl,” his hands clenched into fists, reduced her to a sullen silence. He never struck her but often thrust his face close to hers, his jaw jutting, as he reminded her that in making her wedding vows she had promised to obey him. The children he wanted never came. If he blamed her, he never said so, though his mother sometimes reproached her, accusing her of “doing something to interfere with nature.” But the Greystocks lived well. Windstone Farm was a land of plenty while for years the country suffered postwar privation. Their harvest supper was a great event in Ottery St. Jude. Maud did most of the cooking for it—the best cakes on display were hers—as she did for the dinners Jack liked to give frequently for his numerous friends and their wives. These were the only times perhaps when Jack and Maud gave the impression of being a happy couple, as Jack boasted about her housewifely skills and showed her off in a new dress he had chosen and bought for her.

Hope and Christian sometimes came to stay with their troop of children, allotting a few days to Windstone Farm, twice as many to Alicia Brown and her husband down in the village, and a weekend to Guy and Elspeth. Jack made no secret that the Imbers’ visits were a nuisance to him, but they showed him one thing, that children were tiring creatures to have about the house and not having any of his own might be a blessing. After the family had left, he and Maud always found themselves closer for a few
hours than at any other time, their accord deriving from a shared dislike of the Browns, Jack’s because Geoffrey Brown had once snubbed him at the County Show, and Maud’s from the mythical noblesse oblige. Always quite abstemious, Maud celebrated her family’s departure with a glass of sherry while Jack had tumblers of whisky and water. Without realising it, she had replaced her forebears with her descendants, so that Hope and Christian had taken the place of Mary and John Goodwin and their children those of Sybil and Ethel, people to be resented and ultimately disliked.

Time passed and Maud gradually separated herself from Elspeth and Guy. As Jack put it, Maud had eggs and milk and game “coming out of her ears,” and no need of charity from the likes of the Hardings, snobs as any friends of the Browns must be. Maud was in Ashburton one Friday morning, shopping for a pair of shoes. Clothes rationing was long past; Jack had given her the money and told her it was all right with him for her to splash out a bit. A car drew up at the kerb, and Ronnie Clifford got out of it. The great changes that come to a man’s or a woman’s appearance over the years had not yet taken place in either of them, and she recognised him at once. He may have known her, and she thought he had by the deep flush that coloured his face. Her stare fetched from him an “Oh, hallo,” but the word which should have come after it was absent. He had forgotten her name.

In silence she walked away into the shoe shop.

I
HAD NEVER
lived quite alone before, I had always shared or had a neighbour living just across the corridor. Dinmont House was quite a place to be alone in, so large, so high-ceilinged, and, if in a street of houses, isolated inside its ivy-covered walls. Just as I had been when walking along the canal towing path and the cyclist nearly knocked me over, I was aware of my special vulnerability and of my baby’s. Fay had known that and had asked me if I would like to stay with them for the next four months and beyond if I liked. I was grateful but I refused. She pressed me, almost nagged me, which was most unlike her. After I had failed to answer my phone a few times but let it go to message and then failed to call back, she came round—in both senses. I was determined not to stay with them, but I gave in enough to agree that in future if she rang me more than three times without getting an answer, she and Malcolm would drive over. I think she understood that I felt I had to be here for Andrew when he came back. If he ever did.

I never gave a thought to James’s ghost or to power cuts. The former wasn’t possible and the latter was something I could cope with. Sara came with her baby, Ashling, and Damian came with his fiancée and their baby. Fay and Malcolm often came. People talk about loneliness as if any sort of company puts an end to it: the cleaning lady coming in for two hours or someone calling himself a friend but whom you’ve never really liked. Anyone will
do, apparently. I was lonely but I was lonely for Andrew. Not even for James, though I appreciated his phone calls and his attentive e-mails. I kept in mind what he had said about never again lying to Andrew, and I wondered if this extended to his telling my brother each time he was in touch with me, or had his promise been to tell the truth but not the whole truth? While Andrew had lived here, days had gone by when we didn’t see each other, but I wasn’t lonely then. I knew I would see him tomorrow and if not tomorrow, the next day.

Another source of anxiety was the thesis, and I had begun thinking that maybe they were going to reject it out of hand when I heard with a date for my viva. I was to defend it on a date in October. I went along to confront the two women and a man, expecting to be told that many changes needed to be made, but when I walked in, I was greeted as Dr. Easton, to my great surprise. Mostly, after that, it was praise and congratulations, and only when I was about to leave did they mention, as if in passing, that “one or two little things” needed my attention.

I
KNEW
the trial of Kevin Drake was in November but I had forgotten the precise date, yet I had this curious feeling that after Andrew had given his evidence and it was all over, things would somehow come right. But how they would resolve themselves I didn’t know. Thinking along these lines would always lead me to the enormity of what I had done because it was what
I
had done, not so much what James had done. I could have said no, I should at any rate have
acted
no. And it would have been easy. It could have been done pleasantly and with a smile, with a shake of the head and a gentle removal of myself. Now, when I revisited the event, I could hardly imagine why I had done it. I wasn’t in love with James, I wasn’t passionate about him, madly attracted, nothing like that. These inquisitions always ended with my telling
myself that if I hadn’t done it, I would not have been carrying Tess, not had Tess inside me, moving herself about in a cheerful, determined way.

Last winter, the weather had been bitterly cold, heavy frosts and snow falling in November. We even had that rarity, a white Christmas, that so many people seem to enjoy. This year it is mild, even warm, like September. Flowers are coming out that shouldn’t bloom till April, and yesterday I saw a swallow that should have gone off to a southern country but was deceived by the mildness and stayed behind. I worried about that swallow, though I never saw it again, and I wondered if it had died. But the cold we expected never came.

It was mild, but it still got light late in the mornings and dark early in the evenings. Fay often came in on her way home from work, and once or twice it was warm enough to sit in the drawing-room with the French windows open onto a winter garden where the leaves were still on the trees but falling gently. On one of those evenings, after Fay had gone and I had bolted the front door, the doorbell rang. This happened seldom, just as the landline rang seldom. Callers (in both cases) used their mobile phones, either in preference to the landline or on the doorstep. The doorbell ringing was so unusual, especially since I was alone in the house, that at first I didn’t know what it was. Then I did and decided not to answer it.

Its ringing again, insistently this time, brought to mind Maud in
The Child’s Child
hearing the bell but not answering it when Bertie had walked all those miles on a cold, wet night. In the end she had because Hope made her. But I had no little girl yet to impel me. I wasn’t going to answer that door, not I, a lone woman in a big house at eight in the evening. Instead, I went into the study and looked out of the window. A man and a girl were walking away down the path, but they both turned round when I opened the window.

Their appearance registered strongly with me, and it was well it did. They were young, she several years younger than my graduate students, he nineteen or twenty. He wore those clothes that have become a uniform for men the tabloids call
youths,
black leather jacket, blue sweatshirt, jeans, while she wore a skirt that came halfway down plump, naked thighs that were red from the cold. It might be a mild night but it was November. Her hair was the colour of custard, too orange a blond to be natural, his invisible because he had shaved his head. In the light from the study window I could see the acne pits and scars on his face.

Of course I didn’t take all this in before I spoke to them and they spoke to me, but while they were speaking, while he was asking me if my brother was at home. Not if he lived at Dinmont House, but if he was in.

“Mr. Andrew Easton” was how he put it in that London street talk that is often quite hard to understand. “Is he like in now?”

The girl was nodding her head.

They were not threatening, they were not aggressive, but I felt I must be careful. I must be cautious and noncommittal. Tess moved, gently waving a hand or a foot. “He doesn’t live here anymore. He moved out a long while ago.”

“Where’s he gone to?” This was the girl murdering the English language, so that I had to ask her to repeat what she had said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I barely knew him.”

What could they want? I didn’t know. They seemed harmless, too young and ignorant and—well, too lost to be any sort of menace. And when I denied Andrew, I felt like St. Peter, though comparing myself to biblical characters isn’t my style. “Sorry I can’t help,” I said, and closed the window.

They looked back to watch me watching them go.

I
WROTE
to Toby Greenwell, telling him I had liked
The Child’s Child
and thought it publishable. No one now could possibly object to the clinical details and frank references to homosexual love. I attended to the improvements I had been told the thesis needed. But all the time half my mind was on the boy with the acne and the improbably blond girl who had come to the door. I couldn’t forget them. I wished I hadn’t thought of that phrase about murdering English. Murdering anything or anyone. Why did it bother me? I didn’t know, but I dreamt of seeing someone I didn’t know, someone I had never before seen, a Middle Eastern man lying dead on the pavement in his own blood, surrounded by fiendish, Breughel-like people.

All the time we had been apart I had never contacted James but always left it to him to get in touch with me, as he did quite regularly, but he and Andrew had gone away for a week’s holiday that would come to an end a few days before the trial. Their being away didn’t preclude James’s being in touch, he could have e-mailed or phoned or even texted, but he hadn’t done so during their last short break. What stopped my speaking to him was my certainty that any—well, communication James got that came from me, that came from anyone, Andrew would know about. Belatedly, I wished I had asked that boy and girl for their names. Then I could have given them to the police. But for what reason? They had done nothing, they had only asked where my brother lived. I still wondered why they should want to know where he lived.

J
AMES CALLED
me when he and Andrew came back. Just to know how I was. I told him about the boy and the girl, and James told me that it was nothing, nothing had happened. That nothingness was true for my encounter with them too. They had told me nothing
and I had told them nothing except that Andrew no longer lived at Dinmont House, which was true. James almost dismissed it, but I knew he disliked anything about the coming trial’s being discussed, and this wasn’t even, as far as we knew, about the trial. Talking about Martin Greenwell’s book would be a distraction from that for him, and I wanted to discuss it with him. I wanted to talk to him about what he knew of his great-uncle, and if he had met a fate similar to John Goodwin’s. My mind’s going back to the boy and the girl, I thought that they might have had some entirely different reason for wanting to contact Andrew, though I was bound to say to myself that I couldn’t imagine what that would be.

Fay told me that the trial was due in a week’s time. After the incident with the shaven-headed boy and the blond girl, I would be glad when it was all over. I tried to put it out of my mind and more or less succeeded. Then I woke up in the middle of the night to ask myself if the shaven-headed man could be Gary Summers, the one who was with Kevin Drake at the time of the murder but of whom Andrew and James couldn’t be sure enough to identify. No photographs of him had been in the papers, and I knew his name only from Andrew.

Four days before the trial was due to begin I was out, meeting Louise for lunch in Hampstead High Street. It was a fine, bright day, but rather cold, and baby William was almost invisible inside his furry, brown, all-in-one garment that made him look like a plump puppy. Next time we met, I would have baby Tess with me, similarly wrapped up, for it would still be winter and probably much colder. She too, my daughter, would be related to James’s great-uncle, a great-great-niece, something I had never thought of before. Louise’s news was that she and Damian were getting married, and I thought to myself that this marriage would legitimise William, though I doubted if anyone cared much about that
or even noticed it. It was just that I tended to think along these lines since the thesis.