‘Unless what?’
I gazed at her. She was just like Faith. How could she have thought about moving away.
I spoke calmly. ‘Unless you change your plea.’
Ailsa’s jaw was set firm and her eyes were fixed somewhere in the middle distance, entirely lost to the room, and I wondered for a moment if she hadn’t heard me. But as she continued to sit there, so still, her mind almost audibly turning, I realised she had heard me perfectly.
It had worked.
Epilogue
Max
Resolution, noun. The action, or (in later use esp),
an act of resolving or determining; something
which has been resolved upon; a fixed or positive
intention.
I’ve taken Maudie out onto the common and I’m sitting on the bench at the top of the slope down to the pond. It’s where we sat that first day when Ailsa told me in detail about Tom’s last moments, when I first concocted a plan. It’s cold, properly winter; the trees have lost their leaves – though a few linger, gripping on for dear life – and I’m wrapped up warmly in the maroon puffer and the black scarf. Perfume clings to it now: lily and pomegranate. It smells of her. The bench is damp; even though I wiped it with my gloves, I can feel it begin to penetrate my trousers.
I won’t stay long. I’m a few minutes early, that’s all, for meeting Max off the train. He’s had Magic Club today – the one I found for him in Streatham. He’ll be practising some little rope trick when he gets out, head down; but I’m already looking forward to the moment he’ll notice me and Maudie waiting at the top of the steps, and he’ll grin and run up to meet us. How much happier he is these days.
With good behaviour, Standling thinks Ailsa should be out in ten years. It seems about right. It gives me long enough. We visit her often, Max and me – enough to keep the relationship going, not enough for anyone to feel dependent. I’m enjoying the sense of control. I’m allowed in these days. I’ve got my own photo ID. A provisional licence. When – if! – I pass, I might even drive us down. (I’ve got use of the little Fiat now.) She’s in quite good spirits. She is learning Italian, she told us last time, and her work in the garden is earning her an RHS qualification, ‘so Delilah can stuff it up her arse’. She is grateful to me, has no idea that in the end I betrayed her. Every time we leave, she tells me she’s glad it’s her and not him, and thanks me again for giving him such a wonderful home. ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you,’ she says. ‘You’ve literally saved my life.’ And these days she actually means it. I’m family, she says, and at last it feels true.
Sometimes Max and I bump into Cecily Tilson and the girls. There’s a cafe down the road from the prison that we like to retreat to. Cecily, ‘Tom’s bitch of a mother’, is a poppet when you get to know her. I mean, grand and a terrible intellectual snob, but she and I get on pretty well now we’ve discovered shared interests – crosswords, Italian Renaissance art, the novels of Ann Patchett. She lets Melissa and Bea sleep at mine when they’re up to see friends, though she insisted on inspecting ‘the gaff’, as Bea calls it, first. An excuse for one last massive clear-out. Sue and Maeve, even Bob, came to help. Cecily’s standards are higher than mine, and she sent a man in to mend the staircase and the roof, but she appreciated I’d made an effort, that I was putting the children first. She approved of everything I had done in the back sitting room, now ‘Max’s den’ – even the Xbox. The table tennis table was particularly clever find. Someone had left it outside a house in Ritherdon Road. I persuaded the coaches at Max’s football team to lug it back.
I worked out early on Max had killed Tom. I paid attention to him, you see, unlike anyone else. I knew how much he hated his father. Ailsa was too busy with her own dramas – her little dalliances. It took me a while to think what was best, to keep one chess move ahead. The priority was to keep the focus off Max. One word from me and they’d have released Ailsa. I only had to give them the gloves. I thought the case would be dismissed, that a jury, if not the police, would accept it was a simple mistake. But when the daubings began to appear on my front fence, when I realised how readily her friends would turn against her, I changed tack. There’s been so much in the press about that woman who killed her husband and belatedly got out, I had hopes for a defence of domestic abuse. But it wasn’t a goer. The silly stunt with the scarf – I regret that. He could be a bastard, Tom – I wouldn’t have wanted to have been married to him myself – but she was difficult too. The more I thought about it, the more guilty she seemed. The restlessness, the greed – how jealous she was of Rose’s seaside house – the self-aggrandising self-pity. I know I have my own secrets but, big secrets, when you lay them out on the bed, often turn out to be innocuous. More dangerous are the ordinary everyday lies, the million little shams and pretences between friends. Ailsa was good at that; she honed her own particular form of aggressive mimicry. All things to all people. The fact is she had mental health issues and was off her meds. She was repeatedly unfaithful. Desperate for male attention, for things to go her way. Guilty; it became the obvious solution.
I did consider one other option: telling the police that I’d killed Tom. I look the part, after all. The house, the dishevelled nature of my person. ‘Odd’: isn’t that what people think of me? I had access to the food, to the hemlock (in my own garden, as I’ve discovered). Max, I think, though I haven’t asked, added a frond to his father’s plate, a little garnish. He wouldn’t have risked hurting the rest of his family. I couldn’t say the same about me but at least I could argue I bought pizzas to ensure the children were safe. The sticking point, of course, is that I believed Tom to be away. I’d have to have stated my intended victim was Ailsa. It’s not so implausible. Love/hatred: they’re sides of the same coin. I’d been weakened by my stay in hospital, still under the influence of those strong steroids. The previous day, finding my baby’s bones, she’d forced me to confront the past. I was overwhelmed by grief and delayed trauma. When she told me they were moving, I had a sudden rush to the head, I made an impetuous decision on a hot afternoon? What did Ailsa say I had? Abandonment issues, that’s it. I like to keep things close. I find it hard to let them go. It’s happened before, though I might not have needed to mention that.
So, yes, I did think it through. But did she deserve that sacrifice? Would it really have been the best thing for Max? I realised the answer was no to both of those questions when she dismissed me from their lives – all that talk of a new start elsewhere. After everything I’d done for her. Turns out she was just like Faith. I had to work quickly. A guilty plea, clean, straightforward, the only safe solution.
She was easy to persuade. I showed her the results of a Google search. Nasty child murderers in Wisconsin or Lincolnshire ending up in hideous small specialist units being monitored, treated and assessed by psychiatrists. If I’d given her time, she might have realised Max, a nice middle-class boy, might not have been treated in the same way; a family court would probably have found a discrepancy between his actions and his awareness of their consequences. But one could never be sure. I told her we couldn’t risk asking Standling for advice; the prosecution was already halfway there. Mother’s love: the strongest thing there is.
I miss her. I thought she was the friend I’d been looking for all my life. And in many ways, thinking back over the last ten months, I do have a lot to be grateful to her for. She saw me, looked past the mess, treated me as a friend . . . But I mustn’t be sentimental. She took advantage of me. I was a cover for her affair (she should have told me; she made a fool of me). A free tutor. (Well, she is paying now.) I never did get back my grandmother’s Regency slope. The fact is she reached inside my house, and my heart, rummaged around in it, and threw me aside. The worst kind of betrayal isn’t a major act of treachery, but a minor act of casual indifference.
Ten years stretch ahead of her now – long enough for her to have a jolly good think about her behaviour. Obviously, I’ve taken her out of my will; everything goes
straight to Max whatever age he inherits. Her rehabilitation will probably coincide with his departure for university. Oxford or Cambridge, I have great hopes. His confidence has increased so much without Tom breathing down his neck, and with my help and encouragement. As I told the woman in the bookshop, he’s twelve but has a reading age of seventeen; he’s become a lovely little writer. I’ll keep those hopes to myself – I’m not going to put him under pressure. If he wants Oxford Brookes, or to sit in his room smoking marijuana, so be it. He can be what, and who, he wants. At last I’ve learnt something my mother never wanted to face: that the dishonourable parts of us are as worthy of love as the good.
If he does choose further education – Fred says I’m mad to think otherwise – she could move back in. Fill the empty nest. It might suit us both. We’ll see. I’ll ask Max what he wants when the time comes. It’s tricky, though. The guilty plea – he’s come to believe it, buried his own responsibility way down deep. I’m careful how I talk about her. I’m not taking the place of your mother, I tell him. She is your mother, and she will always be your mother. It’s funny, though: every time I say it, the words seem to mean a little less.
It’s always best to be thinking ahead.
Above the pond, the clouds are dense and grey, but further over I can see a small patch of blue – well not really blue, more of a tinted white, but in the dark sky it’s a little spot of clarity. It feels like that spot of light is what has been happening in my head, as if something massive has lifted. I’ve carried a weight of guilt for several years now, but I think finally it’s gone. That aching hole has filled, too. My nerve endings have begun to tingle. Perhaps it’s the cold. Or perhaps it’s that I’ve realised for the first time in a long time, every day has a purpose; I have someone else to live for.
Right. It’s time to call Maudie to me, and we’ll go back round the pond, and across the road and down to the station. I’ll wait for him as usual on the bridge. I try never to go down onto the platform, if I can help it. It’s the one place memories can come up and swipe you. People trip so easily. All it takes is one shove.
Max was talking this morning about wanting a puppy. He says it would give Maudie a new lease of life. I was resistant but I’ve changed my mind. I’ll tell him on the walk back. We’ll start looking for a rescue.
Get TAKE ME IN, Sabine Durrant’s previous novel, here
Acknowledgements
It’s always useful to have a few things to research to put off writing, and several people were kind and generous enough to indulge me. Thank you to Andrew Watson and Peter Gilliver (OED); Deborah Taylor, David Jeffreys, Hugh French and Michael Maxtone-Smith (the law); Susannah Buxton and Pete Westby (hoarding) and Jill Mellor and Julia Wylie (the habits of hemlock). For help in turning the research and prevarication into a novel, I am eternally grateful to my agent Judith Murray, my editor Joanne Dickinson, everyone else at Greene & Heaton and Hodder, and my husband and first reader Giles Smith.
Finders, Keepers: The mesmerising new thriller from the author of LIE WITH ME Page 28