Later, I refused the offer of a lift home
from my drunken friend who believed God was the Big
Bang, and walked the mile from Poppy and
Seb's to my flat in Clerkenwell. The cool,
damp wind blew in my face, and my scar tingled
faintly. The half-moon floated between 29
thin clouds, above the orange street-lamps. I
felt happy and sad and a little bit drunk. I'd
made my speech--about friendship helping me through,
all of the trite, true phrases about valuing
life more now--and eaten apple crumble. Made
my excuses and left. Now I was alone. My
footsteps echoed in the empty streets, where
puddles glinted and cans rattled in gateways.
A cat wrapped itself around my legs then
disappeared into the shadows of an alleyway.
At home, there was a message on the
answering-machine from my father. "Hello," he said,
in a plaintive voice. He paused and waited,
then: "Hello? Kit? It's your father." That was
it.
It was two in the morning and I was wide
awake, my brain buzzing. I made myself a
cup of tea--so easy when it's just for one. A
bag and boiling water over it; then a dribble of
milk. Sometimes I eat standing at the fridge,
or prowling around the kitchen. A slice of
cheese, an apple, a bread roll past its
sell-by date, a biscuit munched
absentmindedly. Orange juice drunk out of
its carton. Albie used to cook huge
elaborate meals--lots of meat and herbs and
spices; pans boiling over; strange misshapen
cheeses on the window-sill; bottles of wine
uncorked at the ready; laughter rolling and
swilling through the rooms. I sat on my sofa and
sipped the tea. And because I was alone, and in a
maudlin kind of mood, I took out her
photograph.
She was my age then, I knew that, but she
looked ludicrously young and long ago. Like a
faraway child; someone glimpsed through a gate at the
end of the garden. She was sitting on a patch of
grass with a tree behind her, wearing frayed denim
shorts and a red T-shirt. The gleam of sunshine
was on her, dappling her bare, rounded knees.
Her pale brown hair was long and tucked behind her
ears, except for a strand that fell forward over one
eye. A moment later, and she would have pushed it
back again. She had a soft, round face,
sprinkled with tiny summer freckles, and gray
eyes. She looked like me; everybody who had ever
known her always said that: "Don't you look like the
image of your mother? Poor dear," they would add,
meaning me, her, both of us, I suppose.
She died before I was old enough to keep her 31
as a memory, though I used to try to edge myself
back through the foggy early years of life, to see
if I could find her there, on the bleached-out edge of
recollection. All I had were photographs like
this, and stories told to me about her. Everyone had
their own versions. I had only other people's word for
her. So it wasn't really my mother I was missing
now, but the impossibly tender idea of her.
I knew, because of the date my father had written
punctiliously on the back, that she was already
pregnant, though you couldn't tell. Her stomach
was flat, but I was there, invisible, rippling
inside her like a secret. That's why I loved the
photograph: because although nobody else knew it,
it was both of us together. Me and her, and love
ahead. I touched her with my finger. Her face
shone up at me. I still cry when I see her.
2
I have always been nervous of New Year's
Eve. I can't make myself wholly believe in a
fresh start. A friend once told me this meant I
was really a Protestant rather than a Catholic.
I think she meant that I trail my life behind
me: my dirty linen and my unwanted baggage.
Nevertheless, I wanted my return to work to be a
new beginning. The flat was cluttered with all the
things that Albie had left behind. It had been six
months, yet I still had a couple of his shirts in
the cupboard, an old pair of shoes under my
bed. I hadn't properly thrown him out. Bits
of him kept turning up, like pieces of
wreckage washed up on a beach after a storm.
That Sunday evening, I put on a pair of
white cotton trousers and an orange top with
three-quarter-length sleeves and lace around the
neck, like a vest. I put mascara on my
lashes, gloss on my lips, the smallest dab
of perfume behind my ears. I brushed my hair and
piled it, still damp, on top of my head. It
didn't matter. He would come, and then a bit
later he would go away again, and I would be in my
flat on my own once more, with the windows open and the
curtains closed and a glass of cold wine and
music playing. Something calm. I stood in
front of the long mirror in my bedroom. I
looked quite steady. I smiled and the woman smiled
back, raising her eyebrows, ironical.
He was late, of course. He is 33
always just a bit late. Usually he arrives
panting and out of breath and smiling and talking before the
door is even half open, sweeping in on a
gust of conversation, on the crest of some idea or
other, on a boom of laughter. I heard him
laugh before I ever saw him. I turned round, and
there he was, delighted with himself, enviable in that,
I thought at the time.
He was quieter today; his smile was wary.
"Hello, Albie."
"You're looking very fine," he said,
contemplating me as if I were an artwork on a
wall that he hadn't quite made up his mind about.
He leaned forward and kissed me on both cheeks.
His stubble scratched my skin, my scar, his arms
held my shoulders firmly. There was black ink
on his fingers.
I allowed myself to look at him, then stepped
back, out of his embrace. "Come on in, then."
He seemed to fill my spacious living
room.
"How have you been, Kitty?"
"Fine," I said firmly.
"I came and saw you in hospital, you know.
When I heard. You probably don't
remember. Of course you don't. You were quite a
sight." He smiled, and put up a finger
to trace my injury. People seemed to like doing that.
"It's healing well. I think scars can be
beautiful."
I turned away. "Shall we get going?"
We started in the kitchen. He took his
special mushroom knife, with a brush on the end
to flake away dirt, his fondue set with its
six long forks, his ludicrous striped apron and
chef's hat that he insisted on wearing when he was
cooking, three cookbooks. Eel stew, I
remembered. Passion-fruit souffl@e that had
risen too much and blistered on the roof of the oven.
Mexican tacos filled with mince and sour cream
and onions. He ate with gusto too, waving his
fork around and stuffing food into his mouth and arguing and
leaning across the candles on the table to kiss me.
Last Christmas he'd eaten so much goose and
swigged it back with so much hearty red wine that
he'd gone to the casualty ward thinking he was
having a heart-attack.
"What about this?" I held up a copper pan
we'd bought together.
"Keep it." 35
"Sure?"
"Sure."
"And all those Spanish plates that we--was
"They're yours."
But he took his dressing-gown, his South
American guitar music, his poetry and
physics books, his aubergine-colored tie.
"I think that's everything."
"Do you want a glass of wine?"
He hesitated, then shook his head. "I'd
better be getting back." He picked up his
bag. "Funny old world, isn't it?"
"That's it, then?"
"What?"
"Your epitaph on our relationship. Funny
old world."
He frowned at me. There were two vertical
creases above his nose. I smiled to reassure
him that it didn't really matter. Smiled when he
got up to leave with his boxes, smiled when he
kissed me goodbye, smiled as he walked down the
steps to his car, smiled as he drove away.
Now I was going to look ahead, not behind.
The Welbeck Clinic stands in a quiet
residential street in King's Cross. When it
was built in the late fifties, the whole point
was that it shouldn't look like an oppressive
institution. After all, it was going to be a building
in which psychiatrists solved people's problems and
made them happy and sent them back into the world.
What was meant by not looking institutional was that it
didn't look Victorian, with Gothic towers
and small angled windows.
Unfortunately the design was so successful and
highly praised and prize-winning that it influenced
the construction of urban primary schools,
medical centers and old people's homes, and the
Welbeck Clinic now looked very institutional
indeed. Normally I didn't really see the
building, just as I wasn't conscious of my own
breathing. I went to it every day, worked and talked and
studied and drank coffee there. But now, walking
up the steps after weeks away, I saw that the
building was middle-aged, the concrete stained and
cracked. The door dragged on the stone step,
scraping like fingernails as I pulled it open.
I arrived at Rosa's office and she immediately
came out and gave me a long hug. Then she
held me back to contemplate me with a 37
semi-humorous expression of inquiry. She was
dressed simply in charcoal slacks and a navy
blue sweater. Her hair was quite gray now and when
she smiled her face almost shimmered in all its
fine wrinkles. What was she thinking? When I had
first met her, almost seven years earlier, I had
already known her extraordinary work on child
development. I'd occasionally been puzzled by this
great expert on children who had never had children herself, and
I sometimes wondered if the rest of us at the
clinic were competing to be her cleverest son or
daughter. There may have been something maternal about
the way she presided over the Welbeck, but it
wasn't necessarily wise to rely on a mother's
softness and forgiveness. She had a steely
objectivity as well.
"We've missed you, Kit," she said.
"Welcome back." I didn't speak. I just
pulled a face that was meant to look affectionate.
There were butterflies in my stomach; it felt like
my first day at secondary school. "Let's go
outside and talk," she added briskly. "I
think it's cleared up. Isn't the weather funny
at the moment?"
We walked toward the garden at the back and
Francis met us on the way. He was also
dressed casually, in jeans and a dark blue
shirt. As usual he was unshaven, his hair
rumpled. He was a man who wanted to look like
an artist rather than a scientist. When he saw
me, he held out his arms and we had rather an
awkward few seconds of walking toward each
other before I could step into his embrace.
"So good to have you here again, Kit. You're sure
you're ready?"
I nodded. "I need to work. It's just ... this
bit is rather like getting back on a horse again after
a fall."
Francis pulled a face. "I'm glad
to say I've never been anywhere near a horse.
Best idea is not to get on one in the first
place."
It had rained earlier but now the sun was out and the
wet flagstones glittered and steamed. The benches
were sodden so we stood in a group
self-consciously, like people who had just been
introduced at a drinks party.
"Remind me of today's schedule," said Rosa,
for something to say.
"This morning I'm going to see Sue." 39
Sue was an anorexic twenty-three-year-old,
so thin she looked as if the light could shine through
her. Her beautiful eyes were like brimming pools
in her shriveled little face. She looked like a child,
or an old woman.
"Good," she said crisply. "Take it at your
own pace. Let us know if there's any help you
need."
"Thanks."
"There's one more thing."
"Yes?"
"Compensation."
"Oh."
"Yes. Francis is certainly of the view that
you should consider legal action."
"Open and shut case," said Francis. "It
was even done with the policeman's own bloody
mug, wasn't it? What on earth did he think
he was up to?"
I looked over at Rosa. "What do you
think?"
"I would rather hear what you think."
"I don't know what I think. It was all so
confused. You know that the Crown Prosecution
Service ..." I tried to recall the wording of the
letter I'd received his... declined to proceed against
Mr. Doll. Maybe it was their mistake.
Maybe it was my mistake. Maybe it was just an
accident. I'm not sure what I'd be after."
"About a couple of hundred grand, some of us
reckon," said Francis, with a smile.
"I'm not sure that Doll really meant to hurt
anybody. He was just flailing around, panicking.
He picked up the mug and smashed it against the
wall, and cut himself, and then he cut me. He was
a mess even before the police had finished with him.
You know what happens to people in police cells.
They go crazy. They kill themselves or fly at
other people. I should have been prepared for that." I
looked at Rosa and Francis. "Are you
shocked? Do you want me to be angrier? Out for
Doll's blood?" I shuddered. "The police
beat him up pretty badly before throwing him into a
cell. By the sound of it, they thought they were doing me
a favor. They must be furious that he got off."
"They are," said Rosa drily.
"And it was Furth's mistake, though he will
never admit to that, of course. And mine, too.
Perhaps I wasn't concentrating hard enough.
Anyway, I just don't see the point of 41
suing them. Who would it help?"
"People should be held responsible for their
mistakes," Francis said. "You could have died."
"But I didn't. I'm fine."
"Think about it, at least."
"I think about it all the time," I said. "I
dream about it at night. Somehow the idea of
getting someone to compensate me by giving me money
doesn't really seem relevant just now."
"I hear what you're saying," said Francis,
in a tone that made me want to tweak his nose.
It was raining steadily as I drove back;
warm summer rain that splashed on my windscreen,
and sprayed up in iridescent arcs from the wheels
of the trucks that thundered past. The rush-hour
traffic was building, and my eyes felt
gritty, my throat a bit sore.
As I pulled up outside my flat, I
saw that a man was standing at the front door. He
had on a raincoat, his hands in the pockets, and
he was looking up at the house. He heard my
car door slam, and turned to me. His blond
helmet of hair gleamed in the rain. His thin
lips stretched into a smile. I looked at him
for a long time and he just looked back at me.
"Detective Inspector Guy Furth,"
I said.
I felt myself surveyed and evaluated under his
gaze and I tried not to flinch.
"You look good, Kit," he said, and smiled,
as if we were old mates.
"What's this about?"
"Can I come in for a moment?"
I gave a shrug. It seemed easier just
to agree.