‘It was … it seems mad to go there on your own.’
‘Oh yes,’ agreed Semira. ‘I found that out. But at the time, although I was scared, I underestimated the danger that he represented. And you have to remember that because of my job I was used to meeting violent people and bothering them. I’d had to deal with tons of aggressive, brutal fathers already. But back then in London I’d been part of the social services, and so protected. Wherever I went, my co-workers knew where I was going. Or I took a colleague with me. Or even the police, if the situation looked really awkward. Of course that wasn’t the case here.’ She paused briefly and then said thoughtfully, ‘My biggest mistake was not telling anyone what I intended to do. I didn’t let anyone know what I’d planned. That was the madness, Leslie. Driving to that isolated spot, to a sick man like Gordon McBright, and not even leaving a note at home on the kitchen table, which said what I was up to.’
‘You found a child?’
Semira shook her head. ‘No. Not a child. I discovered a man. In a shed beside the farmhouse. He was lying on the ground with his knees up to his chin, like an embryo. That made him look a lot smaller than he was. Barely any light fell into the shed. The kids had thought he was a kid too, but that was the only thing they were wrong about. Apart from that, everything was as they’d said. The iron ring round his neck. The chain which was secured to a beam with a padlock. The dirty straw he lay in. The terrible cold to which he, almost naked, was exposed to. I couldn’t believe it. Even now, talking about it forty years later, I can barely believe it. Although it changed my whole life, it still seems strangely unreal.’ She looked at Leslie, and at the same time looked through her. ‘I’d found Brian Somerville,’ she said.
For the next fifteen minutes she did not say anything, just stared at an invisible spot on the wall. The clock seemed to be ticking twice as loudly as before. It became dark outside.
Leslie did not dare to break the silence.
In the end Semira said, ‘He was dying,’ so directly that Leslie jumped. ‘He was only skin and bones. His body was covered in large wounds that oozed pus. They were marks of the mistreatment he had been subjected to. Later we heard from Mrs McBright that he had been held like a slave and forced to carry out the hardest of physical activities, even when he had still been a boy. As there had been little point in explaining things to him, as he didn’t understand anything, Gordon McBright had regularly beaten him mercilessly until he was of use somehow. Mrs McBright reported that she had often been afraid that her husband would beat Brian to death. That went on for twenty-four years. For twenty-four years Brian had to live in that hell. He was rarely fed, and he was chained up in this shed every evening, and whenever he wasn’t working. Mrs McBright had once brought him a blanket, but her husband had caught her doing it and she never dared to do anything like it again. In some way, as could be gathered from the hearing, Brian’s presence on the farm offered some relief to her, although she claimed to have often stopped her ears so she wouldn’t hear his tortured screams. Her husband hated the boy so much that he increasingly discharged his aggression on him. Mrs McBright herself suffered his attacks less frequently. Maybe that was why she did nothing to help the defenceless child right from the start. Because at first that’s what he was: a child. But maybe she wouldn’t have helped in any case. She was a broken woman. She had not had a will of her own for years.’
Semira shook her head, as if it were all more than she could understand, as Leslie thought. She probably knew better than most people the phenomenon of women who could not defend themselves. Or who tried too late to do so.
‘In any case,’ she went on, ‘Brian didn’t seem to have long to live by the winter of 1970. He wasn’t yet forty, but he looked like someone who was at least sixty. I don’t know what McBright had done to him, but it looked like he wasn’t going to survive it. The man I found on the floor of the shed was still breathing but – even though I’m no doctor – I knew that he would probably not survive, not even with medical attention. And once again I did the wrong thing. Instead of running like hell immediately, jumping into my car and racing to the police, I squatted down next to him. I turned him over. I looked for a tap, because it looked like he was parched. I wanted to help him. Right then and there. And so I stayed too long in the shed. Just too long.’
‘McBright found you there?’
‘Not in the shed,’ said Semira. I managed to clamber out of the window. The shed backed onto the wall around the farm, and the window overlooked a field beyond the wall. The pane had gone long ago. But I still had to walk around the property and get back to the front of the hill. My car was parked at the bottom of it. And that’s when he turned up. At his farm gate. He had looked out of a window and seen my parked car. I had parked a way off among some trees, but now I know that you could see it from one of the farmhouse’s upper windows. And of course the bare trees didn’t conceal it properly. Suffice to say, he was suddenly standing in front of me. If I hadn’t stayed with Brian for so long I’d have already been in the car by then.’
She looked down at the tabletop, tracing a few scratches with her fingers. ‘I knew immediately that I was in extreme danger. The man was a sadist who knew no limits. If he realised that I had discovered his secret, he wouldn’t just let me drive off. I can still recall how my heart pounded and how dry my throat was. And that my legs threatened to give way. I tried to make him believe I was harmless. That I wasn’t from around here and had got terribly lost and come to the farm in the hope of finding someone who could help. He listened, but I could see he was watching me intently. He was not sure. It appeared he had not seen me go into the shed, but he suspected I’d been there. His eyes bored into me. I haven’t looked into colder eyes in my entire life.’ She shook her head. ‘I almost thought I was going to get away safely. He made a few derogatory remarks about Pakistanis and then said I should get lost. So I turned around and started down the hill. Not too quick, so he wouldn’t get suspicious. But then … he reconsidered. He called me back, looked at me, and … something told him that I knew. That I’d seen Brian.’
‘You tried to run away then?’ said Leslie in a voice she did not recognise.
‘I ran for my life. He followed me. He was not a young man any more, but he was strong and determined, and he was getting closer and closer. I knew I wouldn’t manage to make it to my car, open up and get in. There was a little copse below the farm. I turned into it instinctively, without thinking. I needed to find a hiding place, as I hadn’t managed to run away. But the trees were leafless and far apart. I couldn’t hide from him for a moment.’
Leslie took a deep breath. Even if Semira had not already said so, Leslie only had to look at her crippled body, and the laborious way she had walked, to know that McBright had got hold of her and taken out the full extent of his anger on her.
I don’t want to go into the details of what happened,’ said Semira. ‘He got me, and he was raving. I think he considered himself to be fully within his rights to do with me as he wished. I was on his property. It made no difference to him whether I’d been in the shed or in his living room with my hands on his wallet. He had a completely sick character. He was a dangerous psychopath. Later he didn’t die in prison but in preventive detention. Thank God no one was willing to let him out among people.’
‘How did you manage … to stay alive?’
‘That’s a mystery to me to this day,’ said Semira, laughing bitterly. I don’t think McBright thought I would. But there too you see how disturbed he was. It would have been logical for him to check that I was really dead. And if need be, to carry on until I was dead without a shadow of a doubt. Then he would have had to bury my body, to remove all trace of the deed. And drive my car into a nearby pond, something like that. But he didn’t do any of that. He didn’t feel guilty, he didn’t feel like a person who can be held accountable for his deeds does, and so has to make sure he isn’t caught. He just did what he thought was right. He left me in that godforsaken copse and
went away, not caring what would happen to me.’
‘And your husband noticed you were missing that evening?’
‘Not that evening, unfortunately. He was working on the Saturday, and we’d planned to go to the cinema when he got back. He was late, and not finding me, he assumed I’d gone on my own. Or with a friend, and gone for a drink with her afterwards. I would do sometimes, when he was busy, so he didn’t think any more about it. He went to bed and slept. It was only on Sunday morning, when he woke up and realised that I was still not home, that he realised something wasn’t right.’
‘And the whole time you were lying in the wood?’
Semira nodded. ‘Half dead and dropping in and out of consciousness. Both my jaws were broken in multiple places, my nose too, which was so swollen that I could barely breathe. He had shattered my pelvis with a heavy branch. I was in unimaginable pain, but – as I said – at least I was often unconscious. If I try to remember how it was, it all goes hazy. I know it was freezing. And wet. And dark. Now and then it became brighter. I could see the bare treetops above me and the low winter clouds. I could hear birds screeching. I remember the taste of blood in my mouth. I still know that I couldn’t move, not at all. Sometimes I saw people I knew from my time in London, and animals, moving around me. I must have had a high fever. I was convinced I was dying. That didn’t make me panic, just surprised me. The whole time, I thought how once I’d thought death would be different, although I couldn’t actually imagine how it should be. Just different. Simply different.’ Leslie swallowed. ‘When were you found?’
‘Late on Monday afternoon. Forty-eight hours after Gordon McBright had attacked me like a madman and broken almost every bone in my body. My husband had gone to the police on Sunday afternoon, but they didn’t take it seriously at that point. They assumed we’d had a fight, or that I’d felt the need to go back to my clan. In describing me, John had had to say I was Pakistani. I can’t prove anything, but I’m fairly sure that only left the police more uninterested. At the time people were very sceptical about mixed marriages. People assumed they couldn’t work. They thought I’d run off and probably they considered John a complete fool for having got involved with me. In any case, nothing happened at first. John spent all his time calling around, asking even the most remote and fleeting of acquaintances whether they had heard or seen anything of me. As my car was not at the house, it was clear that I must have gone somewhere. But where? John racked his brains. We had not argued. It should have been a weekend like any other. No accidents had been reported to the police. Nevertheless, John called every hospital in the north of England to ask whether a young Pakistani woman had been admitted. Only on Monday afternoon did he remember Gordon McBright. He immediately informed the police of the story. They dispatched a highly sceptical officer, who told John in no uncertain terms how loath he was to visit the isolated farm in the cold and sleet. John drove there too. Of course they saw my car immediately, and then the cogs started to turn. McBright slammed the door in the face of the policeman, who soon after that found Brian Somerville dying in the shed, and called in reinforcements. And that’s about it. They combed the surroundings and found me in the end. By that point I’d been unconscious for a long time. I wasn’t aware of any of this. I only came back to consciousness a day later in the hospital.’
She went silent. It was a long time until Leslie could say anything again. She felt numb, in shock. Suddenly she wished she had never come. Or had never read her grandmother’s letters to Chad Beckett.
‘I suppose,’ she said in the end, ‘that help came too late for Brian? He died, didn’t he? He died because my grandmother and Chad Beckett—’
‘Probably it would have been for the best,’ said Semira. ‘But no, he didn’t die. The doctors saved him. He must have had the constitution of an ox. He really did survive Gordon McBright’s sadism.’
‘And now …’
‘Now he’s an old man,’ said Semira. ‘I sometimes visit him, but it’s not easy for me, because I can barely get around. He lives in a care home in Whitby. Didn’t you know?’
Leslie shook her head.
‘Well,’ said Semira, ‘Fiona Barnes did. For a long time she couldn’t even hope he had died, because until a few years ago I’d always send her a Christmas card reminding her about him. And later, when I stopped doing that, she could easily have found out by herself. I wrote to her again and again to say he was still waiting for her. He asked after her. He barely said anything else, but every day he’d ask the carers when Fiona would finally come. She told me that she had promised him in February 1943 to return one day, and even now, over sixty years later, he still hasn’t given up hope of that. But she didn’t visit him once. And that, Leslie, is what I most hated your grandmother for. That more than everything else.’
11
Outside the windows it was growing dark. The day, which had been so grey, so leaden and lifeless, was giving way to a quiet evening. Yet Gwen hesitated to turn the light on. She did not want to light up her face or that of Dave, who was sitting opposite her. She wondered why she held back. Maybe she was afraid that the sudden brightness would also light up the truth, and that would have been unbearable.
The truth that Dave was going to break up with her.
They had been sitting in the living room of the Beckett farm for about an hour. They had barely spoken in all that time. They could hear Jennifer and Colin walking back and forth above them. At one point the thought had flitted through Gwen’s head as to what the two of them were so busy with up there. You could hear the dogs’ claws on the wooden floor. They seemed to be restless too. Normally they just flopped down in a corner and slept. But then Gwen had decided that it did not matter what Jennifer and Colin were doing up there, what they had planned or what was bothering them.
In view of the fact that her own life was collapsing right now, that was of no interest whatever.
Actually, she had guessed this would happen. She wondered if she had known from the start, the very start, that her relationship with Dave was on thin ice, was not going to last. There had been dozens of signs. She remembered the day when she had gone to his place and asked him to sleep with her. Was it two or three days ago? He had wriggled out of it, evaded her, had got her talking about all sorts of other things. Afterwards he had left for school with obvious relief, after constantly glancing at his watch as if he could not wait for his course to start. He needed an excuse to leave his room and his future wife for a couple of hours. He came back late, spent the whole night reading, and then set off in the early morning on a walk. He had said no when she asked to go with him.
‘I need to be on my own,’ he had said. She had waited in his room for a while, feeling frustrated and humiliated. In the end she had left the house and wandered aimlessly around town for a few hours before she got a cab back to the farm. Without having slept with him. And she had known that she never would: they would never have sex.
Because Dave did not desire her. He felt not the slightest physical attraction to her. He would probably have rather got his rocks off with his landlady than with her. It was not just that he did not love her – he was repelled by her. There was nothing which drew him to her. Nothing – except that bit of land by the sea which she would one day own.
And now he had abandoned even that idea. She had seen that as soon as she and Jennifer had arrived back at the farm. They had spent ages with Ena Witty, who had dissolved into tears again and not wanted to let the two of them go without churning up the whole Stan Gibson affair once more. When they had finally prised themselves away, Jennifer had not wanted to get home immediately, so they had strolled around for a bit and then eaten lunch at the Italian restaurant in Huntriss Row. Then they had walked down to the harbour, had a cup of tea, and Jennifer had even allowed herself two shots. Jennifer was definitely different, thought Gwen. She could not stop talking about Stan Gibson; about Ena Witty, Amy Mills, herself and him. She kept coming back to the question of why Gibson might have fo
und Amy Mills an ideal victim, and why some people seemed predestined to be victims, while others never got close to being one. It was not that Gwen had no interest in this theme, but she had other worries racing around her head. What was to become of her? What future would she have?
Dave had been sitting in the living room with Colin. The dogs were lying on the rug between the two of them and snoring. Someone had lit a fire in the grate. Gwen found it a nice welcome home, at least apparently so. But the situation was temporary, and so of considerably diminished value. The dogs jumping up, waving their tails and panting happily; the two men who came over to the two women; the warmth of the fire; the cosy moment – all of this was not going to last, just a short glimpse of what could have been. A loving husband, children who greeted their mother happily. Instead everything would remain as it had always been. The rare trips she took to Scarborough would always lead her back to a cold house, with no one waiting for her apart from her old father who knew little of her life and concerns. There would be no one else.
Colin and Jennifer had withdrawn, and as so often Chad was nowhere to be seen. After they had looked at each other in silence for a while, Dave had said quietly, ‘I have to tell you something, Gwen …’
He had not said much more than that, because Gwen had replied, ‘I know.’
And he: ‘Yes. Then there’s not much more to be said.’
And she in reply: ‘No.’
And then they had sat again in silence, a silence in which much changed and happened. A silence in which a relationship between two people ends, a relationship which, as Gwen thought, had probably never been what it should have been, and yet which in a strange way had been a relationship. On his side there had been a calculation, on her side hope. Perhaps it could have worked somehow, if the two of them had made an effort.
The Other Child Page 41