‘But, Clare – hasn’t he told you?’
‘Told me what?’
‘Oh God,’ Alex said. ‘I’m so sorry. Gerald’s not working here any more.’
‘What do you mean? He’s had to go to Cardiff or something?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t work for the company at all. They decided to let him go.’
10
If anyone has compiled a Dictionary of Hateful Euphemisms, ‘let go’ deserves its place of dishonour. It’s not a pleasant thing to sack someone, but you make it worse by implying you do it with regret; it’s a euphemism designed to salve the conscience of the person who has done the sacking rather than to console the person who has been sacked.
That’s what I was thinking when I put down the phone without even saying goodbye to Alex. It was a delaying tactic: a pathetically inadequate way of postponing what I really needed to think about: the fact that my husband hadn’t told me that yesterday afternoon, just after lunch, he had been called into his manager’s office and sacked.
The company had foreign owners. Their senior executives were wont to descend on the UK headquarters at a moment’s notice and make sweeping changes. When they sacked people, Gerald had told me, the victims had to clear their desks under the eyes of their line manager. Then they surrendered their security passes and were escorted from the building, usually within the hour. The contents of Gerald’s desk were probably in the boot of his car.
Gerald and I had been married for well over twenty years. I had thought him incapable of surprising me. What made it so extraordinarily bizarre was that he had gone out this morning in the usual way: he had been wearing his second-best suit and the tie I’d made him buy in the Christmas sales; he had taken his briefcase and his packed lunch; he had kissed me on the cheek and said he would see me later. Just as he had done a thousand times before.
My legs were weak, as if I had just left my bed after a few days’ illness. I walked into the sitting room and slumped on to the sofa. Cannop jumped on my lap and purred with a callous lack of interest in what I might be feeling.
So that was why Gerald had come home early yesterday, that was why he had come to the Hovel. Had he changed his mind about telling me he had lost his job when he found me there with Jack? When he had seen whatever he had seen and heard whatever he had heard?
I had thought it impossible for me to feel guiltier than I did. But I was wrong. I had not only betrayed Gerald with his own nephew but I had done so on the very day he had been sacked.
This started another train of thought: what would the loss of the job mean to Gerald, to us? He wouldn’t find it easy to get another job, not at his age and not around here. There would be a redundancy payment, presumably, but that wouldn’t last us long. The mortgage on the house still had twelve years to run. What would we live on? My earnings barely kept me in materials.
But there was another more urgent question – or rather two of them. Where was Gerald now? And what was he doing?
All this time, during the phone call to Alex and afterwards, I had been aware of the distant buzzing of the police helicopter.
I pushed the cat off my lap and went outside. The helicopter was miles away over the Forest. It was no longer making broad sweeps across the sky. It was hovering over a particular spot.
The trouble was, I didn’t know where. As far as I could tell it was in the general direction of Spion Kop, which was tucked away beyond several slopes of wooded hills. But that was all I knew. It was hard to estimate how far away the helicopter was. The Forest is a place that defies easy measurement.
I called Jack’s mobile again and then Gerald’s. In both cases, I went straight to voicemail. Then I did the only thing left: I called the emergency services and asked for the police.
When Gerald came home at last, he wasn’t wearing the tie we had bought in the Christmas sale, and his second-best suit was smeared with mud. He was carrying a cardboard box that had once held bottles of Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand. Poking out of the top was his wireless keyboard, the one he had taken to work a few months earlier because he didn’t like the one in his office. His eyelids had pink rims. He had been crying.
I met him in the hall. Neither of us spoke for a moment. We looked at each other. At the top of the stairs, Cannop was sitting on the landing windowsill, staring down on us.
‘I can’t find Jack,’ I said. ‘I think something’s happened.’
Gerald stared at me.
‘There’s a police helicopter up there,’ I said.
‘Oh God,’ he said, his voice thick as if he had a heavy cold. ‘By the way, they’ve given me the sack.’
‘I know. Alex told me.’
‘What? Did she call you?’
‘I called her.’
His face crumpled. ‘I meant to tell you.’
‘Where have you been?’ I said. ‘For God’s sake, what have you been doing? I’ve been trying to get in touch with you.’
He pushed past me and carried his box up the stairs.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I called after him. ‘About the job, I mean.’
He didn’t reply.
11
I can’t remember everything that happened in the next few hours. Afterwards, too, the days blurred into one another. Fragments of memory stand out, but they are semi-detached from their chronological context. I see them with particular clarity, as I would pieces of painted china in a heap of ashes.
It was a cyclist who had found Jack. I remember marvelling that someone on a bike had managed to reach Spion Kop at all, because it was almost inaccessible, the few paths nearby littered with fallen trees and abandoned blocks of Pennant sandstone, some the size of a small car. The mud was bad that year, too, because of the long, wet winter.
In the end, they decided that the mud might have been a contributory factor.
Long before this, Gerald explained to the police that he had driven around, then parked in a lay-by and, for some of the time, walked in the Forest, where he had got lost. He told them that he had just been made redundant, and that he had needed a few hours alone to come to terms with it. He had been somewhere in the woods between Viney Hill and Blakeney – an area of the Forest he didn’t know well; miles away from both Spion Kop and home. He had switched off his phone because he hadn’t wanted to be disturbed.
No, he said, he hadn’t seen anyone. And no, he hadn’t told his wife he’d been sacked until he got home; he had been screwing up his courage to break the bad news.
I remember the two police officers who came to the house, a man and a woman. The woman had the sweetest smile and kept fiddling with her wedding ring. The man had one of those unfortunate moustaches that look like hairy caterpillars.
The woman asked most of the questions. She was so gentle, so kind – and yet the questions had awkward edges and she returned to them again and again. She and her colleague searched the Hovel and examined the contents of Jack’s backpack.
‘It’s amazing really that he was able to function at all,’ the woman said. ‘With all those pills they were giving him. Poor guy – it’s the wounds you can’t see that do the most harm. Did you ever see him take them?’
‘Never,’ I said. ‘Neither of us had any idea.’
Her face gave nothing away. ‘We’ll discuss it with the doctors.’
She was a kind woman, I think, but a professional. She did what had to be done to the best of her ability.
They questioned Gerald by himself about his relationship with Jack and his movements on the day of his nephew’s death. It was Gerald, as next of kin, who identified the body. I remember him coming home afterwards. The police officer with the caterpillar moustache drove him. Gerald’s face was grey and puffy, like wet newspaper.
He’s had a shock, the officer said – it’s often a shock when you see them that way.
I’ll make some tea, I said, tea with sugar in it.
Who was it who said we measure out our lives with coffee spoons? T. S. Eliot? In our house
, we measured them out with cups of tea.
The police eventually returned Jack’s backpack. We put it in the Hovel and locked the door on it. I had cleaned the Hovel beforehand, sweeping and scrubbing obsessively until I made my knuckles bleed by scraping on the floorboards and the walls. When I had finished, the upper room was entirely empty apart from the mattress propped against the wall with Jack’s backpack beside it. I had been terrified that the police might have found something about me among Jack’s possessions, a diary perhaps, something that might have given them a clue about what had happened on the afternoon before he died. Something about us. But there was nothing there.
‘Did you know he had all that medication?’ Gerald said when we were taking the backpack to the Hovel. ‘All those pills? It turns out most of the packs hadn’t been opened.’
‘I hadn’t the slightest idea.’
‘He seemed quite normal most of the time. Apart from the business with the cat, of course. But you never really know what people are like, do you?’
The facts were established at the inquest. Jack had walked to Spion Kop that morning. The quarry, abandoned for nearly a century, was a designated nature reserve, recognized as a key site for wildlife. But the dangers of this lost and chaotic landscape were also recognized, to the extent that the main excavation had been fenced off with barbed wire. But this had been done years ago. Many of the wooden fencing posts had rotted; the wire had rusted; in some places you could simply step over the remains of the fence and go right up to the quarry.
Jack had fallen from the spot where I had seen him a week or so before his death. It had been, I guessed, his observation point. On one side was a slab of rock. On the other was a birch sapling whose branches stretched into the vacancy over the quarry floor.
Gerald gave evidence to the effect that Jack had become interested in stories of wild cats in the Forest; that he believed he had seen one in the quarry; and that he had returned to Spion Kop that day in the hope of taking a photograph of it that would establish its existence beyond reasonable doubt.
Jack’s phone was produced. The phone’s access to a network had been disabled, presumably by Jack. Perhaps he had turned it off to avoid being disturbed while he was looking for his cat.
The coroner solemnly examined the photos on the phone. There was one that Jack had shown us two days before he died, the one he had been so excited about. The coroner also saw other photographs. I hadn’t known Jack had been taking them, apart from the ones in the Forest. Some of them belonged to Jack’s unknown life in London, but most of them were of us, of our house, of the Hovel – and at least a dozen shots of Cannop in a variety of poses. It’s hard to take a good photo of a black cat, as I knew to my cost, and in most of those pictures Cannop was reduced to a shadow.
Only one photograph had been taken on the day Jack died. It was a shot of the quarry floor, slightly out of focus. There was a shadow in one corner that, if you were looking for it, might just possibly have been a cat; the shadow’s size was difficult to estimate. It was, the police thought, very close to the spot where Jack had fallen. Perhaps he had simply leaned over too far and the muddy edge of the quarry had given way beneath his weight.
The police had seen Jack’s medical records and talked to his former CO. The coroner heard evidence of his psychiatric history and questioned an expert in post-traumatic stress disorder. According to the reports, Jack had at one point had suicidal tendencies. But there was no evidence that these had persisted since he had come to the Forest. There was no reason to suspect anything sinister about the death, nor anything to suggest that he intended to take his life. Nor was there evidence of anyone else being at the quarry, either, not until the cyclist had turned up.
A quiet tragedy. One of the hidden casualties of war. The death was put down to accident.
I could talk to no one about what had happened, least of all Gerald. I couldn’t go to that nice police officer and tell her that I had been having an affair with Jack, and that my husband might have learned of it. I couldn’t remind her that Gerald had just lost his job, a fact he had concealed from me for twenty-four hours, that he had known where Jack was going that morning and that he didn’t have an alibi for most of the day. They must have known all that and decided that it wasn’t relevant.
There was no proof that Gerald had done anything wrong. Besides, I loved him, and he was the father of my children. I couldn’t imagine life without him.
Jack hadn’t left a will. His estate was unexpectedly large. As well as the house in Portugal, his parents had owned two flats in London. These had come to Jack.
Gerald and I went to see a solicitor, who took us through what we already knew from Gerald’s research on the Internet:
‘If somebody dies without a will, the estate goes to the next of kin. You say there are no children or siblings, and that the parents and grandparents are dead? In the absence of any evidence of the wishes of the deceased, the estate will usually go to the uncles and aunts, if any are living. If you are the only one who stands in that relationship to the deceased, then it’ll all come to you once the tax liability is dealt with. It will take time to work through the courts.’
In other words, Gerald would eventually have everything that had been Jack’s.
12
I wasn’t well after Jack died. Nothing serious, but I felt drained of energy for much of the time, and my moods varied. My appetite was patchy, too, and I couldn’t work.
This dragged on for days, then weeks. I wasn’t sleeping properly, which made it worse. Sometimes I dreamed I was in Jack’s cave, the one he had told me about the day before he died: when he had been entombed alive, when he had seen the cat’s eyes and the shadowy shape of the animal. He had fired at the animal, he said, perhaps killed it. But in my dream I don’t remember having a gun. All I remember is the darkness, the claustrophobia, the smell of fear and the eyes of the cat.
I told Gerald I thought I had a virus. I couldn’t say what I really thought: that I was grieving for Jack, and in shock about his death. If I’d told Gerald the truth, he would take it as evidence that I had been besotted with his nephew, and now I was mourning him.
Gerald wanted me to go to the doctor. I hadn’t been quite myself for a couple of months by that stage. In the end I agreed, as much to humour him as to achieve anything for myself. The National Health Service doesn’t provide a cure for grief. Or for guilt.
The doctor was a locum, a young woman I hadn’t seen before. She was very thorough – she examined me as well as questioned me.
Afterwards, when we were sitting again, she said, ‘Is there any possibility that you might be pregnant?’
That afternoon I did the test. To my horror, it came up positive. The question was, who was the father?
In theory, it could have been either Gerald or Jack. Gerald and I were occasionally casual about birth control – all the more so because I had been fairly sure I was entering the menopause, partly because my periods were patchy and no longer regular. (That was one reason why the idea I might be pregnant hadn’t occurred to me until the doctor had pointed it out.)
Leaving that aside, I didn’t know what I thought about being pregnant. It had been so long since the last time – twenty-odd years – that my mind could hardly embrace the idea of it. I wasn’t sure I could cope with a baby any more. What would the children think? How would we manage?
Worst of all, what would Gerald say when I told him? What would he think?
I waited until bedtime. I tried to do it before but I couldn’t manage it. When he came into the bedroom, I was sitting by the window, looking at my dark reflection in the glass.
I turned my head, blinked and said: ‘I’m pregnant.’
‘What?’ He stopped in the doorway. ‘What did you say?’
‘I’m pregnant.’
Gerald stared at me. ‘I don’t believe it.’
‘There’s no doubt about it. I’ve done the test. It was the doctor’s idea.’
‘Oh Ch
rist.’
‘Maybe it’s a good thing,’ I said. ‘In the circumstances. A new beginning – for us, for everything.’
‘It’s not a good thing.’
He turned and went along the landing. I ran after him.
‘Gerald – please. We’ve got to talk about this.’
He glanced over his shoulder. ‘If you say so. But not until I’ve had a drink. Several drinks.’
I was standing in the doorway of our bedroom. The landing light was on and I saw exactly what happened next. Cannop was sitting on the landing windowsill beside the ginger jar with the Chinese lion on its lid. He had been dozing, I think, but our raised voices, and Gerald bearing down on him, woke him with a start.
The cat panicked.
He leapt from the windowsill and streaked for freedom. He and Gerald coincided at the head of the stairs. Cannop collided with Gerald’s legs. The cat yowled. Gerald tripped over him. For an instant, Gerald’s body was in mid-air. He fell into the stairwell with a clatter that shook the house. Cannop shot past him and vanished into the kitchen. I heard the slip-slap of the cat flap.
I ran down the stairs. Gerald was at the bottom. His head was wrenched to one side.
I called his name. He lay completely still.
‘Are you all right?’ I shook him. His eyes were open, staring at me. ‘Wake up. Please. Say something.’
I snatched his arm and pushed up the sleeve of the shirt. I laid my fingers on his wrist. I couldn’t feel a pulse.
Still crouching beside him, I increased the pressure of my fingers on his arm, as if that might somehow make his heart start beating again. I had pushed up the sleeve to his elbow. It was then that I noticed the scratch.
It was on the underside of Gerald’s forearm. It was several inches long. It had scabbed over, but the skin around it was puffy and angry.
13
The Forest is a place of beauty and refuge. But there are horrors among the trees, as anyone who has read a fairytale will know.
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