The House of Special Purpose

by John Boyne

  ‘Where?’ Zoya asked. ‘When did it happen?’

  ‘A couple of hours ago,’ he said, and I couldn’t help but hear him now. ‘Somewhere near Battersea, I think. She’s been taken to hospital. I think she’s all right. I don’t think it’s too serious. But I’ve got Ralph’s car outside. He asked me to collect you.’

  Zoya pushed past him and out of the door, running up the steps towards the car, as if she would have happily left for the hospital without either of us, ignoring the fact that we needed Mr Frasier to drive us there. I stayed where I was, feeling a certain numbness in my legs and a giddiness in my stomach, and the room began to sway a little.

  ‘Mr Jachmenev,’ said the young man, stepping towards me with one hand outstretched as if he might need to act as my balance. ‘Mr Jachmenev, are you all right?’

  ‘I’m fine, boy,’ I snapped, turning and making for the door too. ‘Come on. If you’re to take us there, then for pity’s sake let’s go.’

  The drive was a difficult one. The traffic was heavy and it took us almost forty minutes to make our way from our Holborn flat to the hospital. Throughout the journey, Zoya peppered the young man with questions, while I sat in the back of the car, silent as a mouse, listening, refusing to speak.

  ‘You think she’s all right?’ Zoya asked. ‘Why do you think that? Did Ralph say that?’

  ‘I think so,’ he said, sounding more and more as if he wished he was somewhere else entirely. ‘He phoned me at work. I’m not far from the hospital, you see. He told me where he was, asked me to meet him at the reception desk immediately and to take my car and to come and find you both.’

  ‘But what did he say?’ asked Zoya, a note of aggression entering her tone. ‘Tell me exactly. Did he say she was going to be all right?’

  ‘He said she’d been in an accident. I asked whether she was all right and he sort of snapped at me. He said Yes, yes, she’ll be fine, but you’ve got to fetch her parents for me right away.’

  ‘He said she’d be fine?’

  ‘I think so,’ said Mr Frasier. I could hear the note of panic in his voice. He didn’t want to say anything that he thought he shouldn’t say. He didn’t want to give false information. Offer hope where there was none. Suggest that we prepare ourselves when there was no need. But he had something that we had not and I could tell from his voice what it meant. He had seen Ralph. He had seen the look on Ralph’s face when he’d collected the keys for the car.

  Arriving at the hospital, we ran towards the reception desk and were immediately directed along a short corridor and up a flight of stairs. Looking left and right at the top we heard a voice calling our names – Grandma! Grandpa! – and then young feet, our Michael, only nine years old, running towards us, arms outstretched, his face bleached with tears.

  ‘Dusha,’ said Zoya, reaching down to pick him up, and as she did so I looked further along the passageway until I saw a man with a shock of red hair deep in discussion with a doctor and I recognized him as my son-in-law, Ralph. I watched. I didn’t move. The doctor was talking. His face was serious. After a moment he extended an arm, placed his hand on Ralph’s left shoulder and pursed his lips. There was nothing left to say.

  Ralph turned then, sensing the commotion behind him, and our eyes met. He stared through me, his expression telling me everything that I needed to know as he focussed on my face for a long time before recognizing me.

  ‘Ralph,’ said Zoya, pushing Michael aside now and running towards him, dropping her handbag on the ground as she did so – when had she even collected it, I wondered? – a hairbrush, clips, a notepad, a pen, some tissues, keys, a purse, a photograph, I remember it all, falling out and splashing across the white tiled floor as if her entire life had suddenly come apart at its centre. ‘Ralph,’ she shouted, grabbing him by the shoulders. ‘Ralph, where is she? Is she all right? Answer me, Ralph! Where is she? Where is my daughter?’

  He looked at her and shook his head and in the silence that followed, Michael turned to me, his chin wobbling slightly in terror at the unexpected nature of the emotions that surrounded him. He was wearing a football shirt, the colours of his favourite team, and it occurred to me that I might take him to see a home game soon, if the weather permitted it. He would need to know that he was loved, this boy. That our family was defined by those we had lost.

  Please, Mr Jachmenev, she had said and finally I agreed to accompany the woman who had been watching me at the library to Russell Square, where we sat awkwardly on a bench, side by side. It felt strange to me to be sharing such an intimate setting with a woman who wasn’t my wife. I wanted to run from the scene, to take no part in it, but I had agreed to hear her out and I would not break my word.

  ‘I’m not trying to compare my suffering with yours,’ she said, choosing her words carefully. ‘I understand that they’re completely different things. But please, Mr Jachmenev, you must believe me when I tell you how sorry I am. I don’t think I have the words to express the remorse that I feel.’

  I was pleased by the activity that surrounded us, for the noise and hum of conversation permitted me to pay a little less than my full attention to her. In fact, as she spoke I was half listening to a young couple seated only about ten feet away from us, engaged in a heated debate about the nature of their relationship, which was, I gathered, unstable.

  ‘The police told me that I shouldn’t contact you,’ continued Mrs Elliott, for that was the name of the lady who had knocked down and killed my daughter on the Albert Bridge Road several months before. ‘But I had to. It just didn’t feel right to say nothing. I felt I had to find you and speak to you both and make some sort of apology. I hope I didn’t do wrong. I certainly don’t want to make things any worse for you than they already are.’

  ‘Speak to us both?’ I asked, picking up on that phrase as I turned to her and frowned. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘To you and your wife, I mean.’

  ‘But I’m the only one here,’ I said. ‘You came to see me.’

  ‘Yes, I thought that was for the best,’ she replied, looking down at her hands. I could see how nervous she was by the way she kept twisting and turning a pair of gloves between her fingers, an action that put me immediately in mind of David Frasier on the evening that he had stood outside our front door in a state of anxiety. The gloves were clearly an expensive pair. Her coat, too, was of a very fine quality. I wondered who this woman was, how she had come into her money. Whether she had earned it, inherited it, married it. The police, of course, had been willing to tell me anything that I wanted to know and I think it surprised them that I wanted to know nothing. I needed to know nothing. What possible difference would knowledge have made, after all? Arina would still be dead. Nothing was going to change that.

  ‘I thought if I saw you first, and talked to you, and explained to you how I felt,’ she continued, ‘then perhaps you could talk to your wife and I could meet her too. To apologize to her.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said, nodding my head and allowing a gentle sigh to escape my lips. ‘I understand now. It’s interesting to me, Mrs Elliott, the different way that people have approached my wife and me over these last few months.’

  ‘Interesting?’

  ‘There’s a curious feeling among people that somehow it’s worse for the mother than it is for the father. That the grief is somehow more intense. People ask me constantly how Zoya is holding up, as if I am my wife’s doctor and not my daughter’s father, but I don’t believe they ever ask the same thing of her about me. I could be wrong, of course, but—’

  ‘No, Mr Jachmenev,’ she said quickly, shaking her head. ‘No, you misunderstand me. I didn’t mean to suggest that—’

  ‘And even now, you come to talk to me first, to lay the groundwork for the much more difficult campaign ahead, as you see it. Of course, I don’t think for a moment that it was easy for you to initiate this conversation. I admire you for it, if I’m honest, but it’s depressing that you think that I feel any differently about Arina�
�s loss than my wife does. That her death is any less painful to me.’

  She nodded and opened her mouth to speak, thought better of it and looked away. I said nothing for a moment, wanting her to think about what I had said. To my left, the young man was telling his companion that she needed to relax, that what did it matter, it had been a party, he had been drunk, she knew that he loved her really, and she was retaliating by calling him a series of vulgar names, each one more repugnant than the last. If her intention was to make him feel chastened, then she was failing, for he was laughing in mock-horror, an action which only exacerbated her wrath. I wondered why they felt the need for the world to overhear their quarrel. If, like film stars, their passion was only real when it had witnesses.

  ‘I’m a mother too, Mr Jachmenev,’ said Mrs Elliott after a few moments. ‘I suppose it’s only natural that I would immediately consider the feelings of another mother in this circumstance. But I certainly didn’t mean to diminish your suffering.’

  ‘You’re a parent,’ I said, countering her remark, but I softened a little nonetheless. It was easy to see how much pain this woman was in. I was in terrible pain too, but that could never be alleviated. It would be so easy for me to lessen her anguish, to assuage her conscience even by a small amount. It would be a gesture of infinite kindness and I wondered whether I was capable of it. ‘How many children do you have?’ I asked after a moment.

  ‘Three,’ she said, sounding pleased to be asked. Of course she was; they all want to be asked about their children. They, now, not we. ‘Two boys at university. A girl still at school.’

  ‘Do you mind if I ask their names?’

  ‘Not at all,’ she said, surprised perhaps by the friendliness of the question. ‘My eldest boy is John, that was my husband’s name. Then Daniel. And the girl is Beth.’

  ‘Was your husband’s name?’ I asked, turning to face her now, having picked up immediately on the tense.

  ‘Yes, I was widowed four years ago.’

  ‘He must have been quite young,’ I said, for she herself was only in her mid-forties.

  ‘Yes, he was. He died a week before his forty-ninth birthday. A heart attack. It was entirely unexpected.’ She shrugged her shoulders and looked into the distance, lost now for a moment in her own grief and memories, and I glanced around the park, wondering how many of the people gathered there were suffering similar pain. The girl to my left was suggesting to the boy a variety of things he could do to himself, none of which sounded particularly pleasant, and he was trying to prevent her from standing up and leaving. I wished they would lower their tedious voices; they bored me intensely.

  ‘Can I ask you about your daughter?’ she asked me then and I felt my body grow a little more rigid at the audacity of her question. ‘Of course, if you’d rather I didn’t—’

  ‘No,’ I said quickly. ‘No, I don’t mind. What would you like to know?’

  ‘She was a teacher, wasn’t she?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘What did she teach?’

  ‘English and history,’ I replied, smiling a little at how proud I had been that she had chosen such impractical subjects. ‘She had other ideas though. She planned on being a writer.’

  ‘Really?’ asked Mrs Elliott. ‘What did she write?’

  ‘Poems when she was younger,’ I said. ‘They weren’t very good, to be truthful. Then stories when she was older, which were much better. She published two, you know. One in a small anthology, the other in the Express.’

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ she replied, shaking her head.

  ‘Why would you? It’s not the sort of thing that the police would tell you.’

  ‘No,’ she said, her jaw setting a little at my use of that terrible word.

  ‘She was writing a novel when she died,’ I continued. ‘She had almost finished it.’

  And now I must admit my own remorse at what I was doing to this woman, for not a word of this was true. Arina had never written any poems that I knew of. Nor had she published any stories or attempted to write a novel. That was not her calling at all. It was as if by inventing this creative side to her character I was suggesting that a great potential had been extinguished too soon, that she had killed more than just a person, but also all the gifts that she might have offered the world over the course of her lifetime. ‘There was already some interest, I believe,’ I continued, lost in the embellishment of my own lie. ‘A publisher had read her stories and wanted to see more.’

  ‘What was it about?’ she asked me.

  ’How do you mean?

  ‘The novel that she was writing. Did you read it?’

  ‘Some of it,’ I said quietly. ‘It was a story of guilt. And of blame. Misplaced blame.’

  ‘Did she have a title for the book?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can I ask what it was?’

  ‘The House of Special Purpose,’ I replied without any hesitation, frightened by how many truths my lie was placing before her, but Mrs Elliott said nothing, simply turned away from me now, uncomfortable with where our conversation had led us. I felt awkward too and knew that I could not continue with this charade for any longer.

  ‘You must understand, Mrs Elliott,’ I said, ‘that I do not blame you entirely for what happened. And I certainly don’t … I don’t hate you, if that’s what you’re thinking. Arina ran out on the road, I am told. She should have looked. It doesn’t matter, does it? None of it will bring her back. It was brave of you to come to see me, and I appreciate it. Truly, I do. But you cannot see my wife.’

  ‘But Mr Jachmenev—’

  ‘No,’ I said firmly, bringing my hand down on my knee, like a judge descending his gavel upon the courtroom desk. ‘That is how it must be, I’m afraid. I will tell Zoya that I have seen you, of course. I will let her know of your great remorse. But there can be no contact between the two of you. It would be too much for her.’

  ‘But maybe if I—’

  ‘Mrs Elliott, you’re not listening to me,’ I insisted, my temper growing a little more. ‘What you are asking for is impossible and selfish. You wish to see us both, to have our forgiveness, so that in time you may move past this terrible event and, if not forget it, then at least learn to live with it, but we will not be able to do that, and it is no concern of ours how you manage to confront your own response to this accident. Yes, Mrs Elliott, I know it was an accident. And if it is of help to you, then yes, I forgive you for what you have done. But please. Do not seek me out again. And do not try to find my wife. She could not cope with meeting you, do you understand that?’

  She nodded and started to cry a little but I thought no, this is not the moment where I become the protector. If she has tears, let her shed them. If she is in pain, then let her feel it. Let her children talk to her later and tell her the things that she needs to hear in order to find her way through these dark days. She still has hers, after all.

  It was time for me to go home.

  ‘You think it’s your fault, don’t you?’

  Zoya turned to look at me, her expression a mixture of disbelief and antagonism. ‘What do you mean?’ she asked. ‘I think what’s my fault?’

  ‘You forget,’ I said. ‘I know you better than anyone. I can tell what you’re thinking.’

  More than six months after Arina’s death and the normal routines of our lives had begun to reassert themselves, as if nothing untoward had ever happened. Our son-in-law, Ralph, had returned to work and was doing all that he could to keep his grief at bay for Michael’s sake. The boy still cried every day and spoke about his mother as if he believed that we were somehow keeping her from him; her loss, the incomprehensibility of her death, was a matter with which he could not yet come to terms. There were sixty-two years between Michael and me, and yet we might have been twins for the similitude of our emotions.

  We had just returned from our son-in-law’s house, where Zoya and Ralph had argued about the boy. She wanted him to spend more nights with us, but Ralph didn
’t want him to sleep outside of his own bed just yet. In the past, he had been accustomed to staying over, to sleeping in the room that had been his mother’s as she grew up, but that arrangement had come to an end immediately after her death. It wasn’t that Ralph was trying to keep Michael from us, he simply didn’t want to be without him. I understood this. I thought it entirely reasonable. For I knew what it was to want my child with me.

  ‘Of course it’s my fault,’ said Zoya. ‘And you blame me for it too, I know you do. If you don’t, you’re a fool.’

  ‘I blame you for nothing,’ I shouted, stepping towards her now and turning her around to face me. There was a hardness to her expression, a look that had hidden itself away for many years but had reappeared now, since Arina had been killed, that told me exactly what she was thinking. ‘Do you think I hold you responsible for our daughter’s death? The idea is madness. I hold you responsible for one thing only. Her life!’

  ‘Why are you saying this to me?’ she asked, her voice betraying how close she was to tears.

  ‘Because you’ve always felt it and it has overshadowed our lives. And you are wrong, Zoya, can’t you see that? You could not be more wrong to feel this way. Remember, I’ve seen how you’ve reacted every time. When Leo died—’

  ‘Years ago, Georgy!’

  ‘When we lost friends in the Blitz.’

  ‘Everyone lost friends then, didn’t they?’ she shouted. ‘You think I held myself responsible?’

  ‘And every time you miscarried. I saw it then.’

  ‘Georgy … please,’ she said, her voice straining. I wasn’t trying to hurt her, you understand, but it came from my heart. It needed to be said.

  ‘And now Arina,’ I continued. ‘Now you think that her death is because of—’

  ‘Stop it!’ she shouted, rushing towards me, her hands twisted into fists that beat against my chest. ‘Can’t you stop it for even a moment? Why do you think I need to be reminded of these things? Leo, the babies, our friends, our daughter … yes, they’re all gone, every one of them. What good does it do to talk of them?’