In the morning Ralf comes into work as normal and asks me how you’re meant to tackle a crème brulée. ‘I mean, are you supposed to eat the topping or what?’ I know then that our business relationship is safe. Cast iron.
In the year that follows, and as our reputation spreads, Ralf gets invited to dinner after dinner. They’re a lot longer and more expensive than any dinners I’m ever invited to. At least once a month, some headhunter or high-echelon executive sits Ralf down in front of the incomprehensible tasting menu at a prestigious hotel (‘What’s ceviche?’). It’s my turn now to play the backroom boy, arguing contractual points over a working lunch of finger food and soup. I’m in my thirties, old enough not to mind the chop and change of status, but Ralf’s dominance – I’m tempted to say his celebrity – does surprise me sometimes. You should see the girls he goes out with now. The terror on his face.
Ralf is Loophole’s golden goose, there’s no hiding the fact, and everybody wants a piece of him. Eventually the temptation gets too much and I ask him, straight out, why he stays. ‘Because, you know, you could write your own ticket.’
His face falls. You would think I was jilting him. ‘We’re having fun, aren’t we?’
He is, after all, the same old Ralf.
By the time we’ve all reached our mid-thirties, what Hanna and Michel most resemble – this adventurous yachtswoman and her bestselling husband – are a couple who work in financial services. They have that kind of house, garden, summerhouse and car. They have that kind of life, their talk less conversation now than camouflage, as they adopt the political coloration of their highland home.
I see them regularly because of this godparent business. The pressure of his success is taking Michel away from home at weekends, to conventions, launches, premieres, private screenings. When the event is something Hanna wants to go along to, I come over and take care of Agnes for them. We go to zoos and parks, visit festivals and wave our flags in civic parades, we watch movies and tap our feet in folk concerts. It’s exhausting. One afternoon while I’m clearing up their kitchen I go to put bread in the bread bin and I find a tortoise in there. A wind-up plastic tortoise. For one horrible second it looked like some sort of super-cockroach. I take it out, stare at it, run it under the cold tap, shake water out of the mechanism and put it on the draining rack. Outside, a sudden gust sends rain rattling against the rigid plastic tunnel that covers their swimming pool. The wind sweeps off the mountains here without warning. The evening sky glitters uneasily. Far off, too far off to be heard, there is lightning.
Loudly, over the sound of her platform game, I ask, ‘Agnes? Do you want an umbrella?’
Agnes glances round. She’s five now, and insists on wearing scaled-up versions of the clothes her dolls wear. The controls of her games system come with safety straps to stop her accidentally hurling them at the TV. She looks like the prisoner of a dystopic police state. Her look is blank, uncomprehending. She hasn’t eaten anything in hours.
‘I think you should have an umbrella.’
‘No,’ she says.
‘Agnes, you need an umbrella. A banana. I mean a banana. Oh, God.’
One warm weekend in October I take Agnes to the coast for a last-chance spot of beachcombing. It’s so hot when we get there, Agnes is shedding her clothes all over the rocks. She’s still scared of the sea. When I suggest that we follow a line of wooden markers across the sand to a low wooded island, its all-year conifer green flecked pink and turquoise with rental bikes and ice-cream, she balks, as though the tide were pouring in already on great coasters.
‘I’m sure it’s fine.’
Children and dogs are scampering through the bright standing shallows. It looks from here as though they are stamping a vast mirror to pieces. Agnes shakes her head, wide eyed and solemn. Instead, she wants me to splash with her across a tidal puddle that has formed at the foot of the boat ramp, far away from the sea.
‘Again.’
‘Let’s go again.’
‘Come on, I’ll take your hand.’
We’re playing this game for at least half an hour, and I have this vision of myself, in clear view of the ocean, striding back and forth across this puddle like a trained dolphin swirling round its pool, not quite bright enough to understand the nature of its imprisonment.
Come early evening I’m driving Agnes back home, crawling up the motorway with an operetta hammering the speakers, when she says, ‘Will you come to ours for Christmas?’
‘I don’t know, love.’
‘Mummy and Daddy are going to ask you.’
‘Are they?’
‘They say you shouldn’t be alone at Christmas time.’
Hanna and Michel are back home by the time we arrive. Michel’s already in his summerhouse, working. Hanna makes a pot of coffee for me, to set me up for the drive back to the capital. ‘Thanks for today.’
‘It was no problem at all.’ I take a seat at their kitchen table and leaf through Agnes’s storybooks. She’s tucked up in bed now, but she’s not asleep. I can hear her, faintly, cheerfully chuntering to herself. She has a torch in there. She stays up all hours, playing, telling stories. I wonder why they’ve not had a second child.
While the coffee is heating up on the hob (for all their creature comforts they have never succumbed to a complicated coffee machine) Hanna moves around the kitchen, stacking, sorting, putting away. She has help – cleaners, an au pair off and on. I think she is making all this work for herself now just to avoid me. It doesn’t often happen that we’re alone, without Michel or Agnes somewhere around. I’m surprised Hanna’s put Agnes to bed, to be honest. The girl’s sharp as razors – an effective chaperone. Which reminds me. I repeat to Hanna what Agnes said to me in the car.
‘Jesus,’ Hanna laughs, ‘we’re going to have to watch our mouths around that one.’ She rescues the jug from the stove and pours. ‘So, will you come? Seeing as you’re aged and infirm and in need of help.’
‘Lonely, too.’ The coffee’s too hot to drink. I blow on it. ‘Bloody lonely, don’t forget.’
She throws a biscuit at me. ‘“It was weeks before the neighbours noticed the smell.”’
‘If you put it like that, I can hardly see how I can refuse.’
‘Michel’s Mum is coming, too.’
‘Poppy? Really?’
‘Just for a day.’
‘I should hope so.’
Hanna doesn’t seem to want to hurry me out of the house particularly, yet what can we say to each other while the matter of Agnes, and Agnes’s paternity, remains unbroached? The older Agnes gets, the more convinced I am that she’s mine. The facial similarity isn’t definitive, but it’s still there. Her long, slightly mournful upper lip, and her nose, a little snubbed. (It lets her down, a little heavy for her face.) More, it’s her manner. Well, her mannerisms. The prim way she tells her stories, her eyes sparkling. Her easy and comical outrage. A dozen tiny gestures. They remind me of my mother. When that happens, something cold and clinging fastens itself around my guts and I know that, sooner or later, for the girl’s sake, I am going to have to say something. I will have to. It would be unfair not to. It would be wrong.
If they hadn’t made me the girl’s godfather, and weren’t as a family so comfortable to be around, I think I would have said something by now, and hang the consequences. Given my mum, and what she did to herself, it is essential that they know. But I am Agnes’s godfather, I play with her almost every other weekend, and she has come to matter to me in ways I could not have predicted. Once I tell Hanna and Mick that I think Agnes is mine, then I will lose her, if not forever, if not entirely, then for a long time, and there will always be this cloud over us. This is a sacrifice I know I must make, but frankly I haven’t the guts.
At the door, as I’m saying goodbye, girding myself for the drive back to the city, Hanna says, ‘I’ve never understood why you and Mick are so hostile towards Poppy.’
Poppy? Poppy. How old must she be now? Well into her seventies, I would have thought. I haven’t thought about Poppy in years, and when I have, it’s always been with affection, or at any rate, with amusement. ‘I think “hostile” is a bit strong.’
‘No,’ Hanna says, ‘it isn’t.’
‘Well. You probably had to be there. Good night.’
‘Good night, Connie.’
I lean in for a kiss but she has already turned away; she is closing the door on me.
‘C
ome on, Connie,’ Dad called, swinging my bedroom door open. Since about half-past six he had been trying to rouse me. He was leaving early. He had a conference to attend, a presentation to give. Something very last-minute and, by the sound of it, important. He was stressed. ‘Are you at cricket practice this evening?’
Groaning, I pulled the duvet over my head.
He stepped into my room. ‘There isn’t time for me to give you a lift into school.’
I flung the duvet off and sat up. ‘
Shit
.’
‘Conrad.’
‘Sorry.’
‘You’re just going to have to lug everything in yourself.’
Usually, when there was an evening practice, Dad gave me a lift to school in the car. Getting there on foot was not easy, given the sheer amount of kit I had to carry. I had my own bat, my own pads, my own gloves – last year’s unlooked-for birthday present.
‘No problem,’ I said.
‘I’m sorry, Conrad.’
‘S’okay.’
‘I’m sorry.’ For one horrible moment it looked as though he was going to hug me.
‘Dad, it’s okay. Just let me get dressed, yes?’
He remembered himself. He forced a smile. ‘What do you want for breakfast?’
‘Eggs?’
‘Sure.’
Dad clattered around in the kitchen while, piece by piece, I assembled myself. Textbooks, uniform, kit. Bits of sleep-deprived brain.
Dad called up the stairs, ‘Have you got everything?’
‘Everything but the kitchen bloody sink.’ It was embarrassing, striding onto the school cricket pitch in such brand-new gear. It must have cost my parents a small fortune.
‘Jumper?’
‘In this weather?’
‘Jumper.’
‘Okay, Dad.’
I threw the whole lot into a leather-handled green canvas bag that, by disregarding a hundred years of innovation in man-made textiles, was an embarrassment in itself.
I lugged the bag downstairs. The key was hung up as usual by the side door. Dad kept our car parked among all the others out the front of the hotel. I went out with my bag. I was still dozy, running on habit, and it wasn’t until I turned the key to open the boot that I remembered I wasn’t getting a lift. Before I could catch the boot lid it swung up on its spring.
Mum lay curled up inside, barefoot, in denim shorts and one of Dad’s cast-off jumpers. The chalk-white shapelessness of her legs made it clear to me, straight away, that she was dead.
My eyes drank in strange details – hairs on her calves; her rough, blotched knees – as though death were an extreme form of bodily neglect. Her face, blue and swollen and bovine, was only partly visible through the fog that had collected on the inside of the bag. She’d taped it around her throat with brown tape. It was one of our big freezer bags from the kitchen. Near where her eyeball had stuck to the plastic there was a white patch, a writable surface, ‘BEST BEFORE’ in clear cut-away type. Her bottom teeth were visible. They were very small.
‘Conrad!’
I dropped my bag and turned.
Dad stood at the entrance to the hotel. He had an apron tied around his middle, protecting his suit. A spatula in his hand.
Things slowed down around me, or seemed to, driven out of mind by the clatter inside my own head. It felt, for a moment, as if I hung outside myself, watching myself thinking.
Mum in the boot – whose doing was this? Mum’s own. The bag around her head was sign enough of that. The stench of whisky and bleach. For years, and wordlessly, Dad and I had been living in anticipation of this moment. Batting it away. Facing it down. All for nothing. Here it was at last.
But this was not what was supposed to happen. It was supposed to be Dad who had found her like this. Dad, called away at short notice on a last-minute trip!
I
had opened the boot instead.
I
had discovered her. ‘Dad?’
He just stood there in the shade of the portico, shoulders raised in a half-shrug. Nonplussed.
Who had invited Dad to this last-minute conference? Was the conference even real? Mum had planned this. She had expected Dad to find her here as he got ready to go, filling the boot with vests and goggles and all the rest of his visual paraphernalia. It hadn’t been enough that she had decided to destroy herself at last. She had wanted to destroy Dad, too. She still could.
All right.
I turned.
Dad had gone back inside.
It was clear enough what I had to do. I had to go back inside and find him. Warn him. Tell him. At least if I told him what she had done, then he would be prepared. Seeing her there, dumped like a deer in the back of a poacher’s car, would no longer be the killer shock that Mum had meant it to be.
The trouble was, I didn’t know if I
could
tell him. I didn’t know if I had the strength to go back into the hotel and catch him as he came out through the lobby, asking for his car keys.
And what if I did tell him? What then? Dad runs pell-mell to the car, to see the thing his wife has made of herself, and he sinks to his knees in the car park; or he hugs me, hugs me like he hugged me when we drove back from hospital, hugs me and trembles and fails and falls apart in my hands the way he did before, and across the road the estate just goes on and on and on, its roofs a burial ground of red pyramids—
Dad was back in the kitchen, cooking bacon and eggs. He had his back to me, shoulders hunched as he nudged food around the pan. The pressure was back on him again. When Mum left for the protest camp, there were always a couple of days of decompression, and Dad brightened. Soon enough, though, he was fretting over her absence just as much as he had been fretting in her presence. How was she? What was she up to? Was she well? Was she safe?
Now I would have to rob him of that and lay upon him something new – a burden unimaginably heavier than the one he was used to. ‘Dad.’