‘I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know,’ she said and the repetition helped her. It stopped him talking, stopped his questions, stopped her own thinking. ‘I don’t know –’
‘Cigar butt, if you ask me,’ someone said gruffly and she took a breath and stopped repeating the silly phrase and turned to him, needing to know, needing to be told it wasn’t Giovale who had done it, that under her prodding he hadn’t come here and destroyed her life.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Can’t be sure of nothing,’ the man said and shook his head. ‘You’d be amazed the sort of fires people can start an’ how they do it. But there’d be no percentage in Cray Costello torchin’ his own place, would there? Not with himself in it. No man’d kill himself that way. Stands to reason. There weren’t no arson here, and no one won’t be looking for it.’ And he went squelching away in his water-sodden boots back towards the source of the smell and the light, which was reducing; already the flickering had stopped, and now there was just a dull glow coming down the drive between the bushes and the crackling sound had ceased. She could hear the sea again, whispering and then hissing back up the beach, and other night sounds; small creatures moving furtively in the undergrowth and distant cars on the roads and somewhere far off the melancholy cry of a train whistle.
‘Come on, lady,’ the man beside her said, still gruffly but with an underlying gentleness. ‘Come on. The cops is here now and they’ll take care of you. Come on, lady. No need to stay here. Ain’t nothing more you can do. Nothing at all.’
‘Show me,’ she said suddenly. ‘Show me. I have to know –’
The man peered at her. ‘Show you what?’
‘My boys – my husband – show me …’
He recoiled as though she’d spat at him. ‘Lady! I told you – they’re like – it wouldn’t be fittin’!’
‘She’ll have to identify them,’ someone said out of the darkness, and she turned and stared and saw a policeman. ‘Sorry, but someone has to. Want to do it now, lady? I can fix it now if you want –’
‘Oh God,’ she said. ‘Oh, God, tell me what to do! I have to know, you see. I have to know if it is them and I have to know if he did it and –’
‘Did it? Did what?’
‘If Gian Giovale did it –’
‘Hey, lady, what are you saying? Do you know something about this here business what we oughta know?’
‘What?’ She was staring round distractedly now, and then heard her own voice again, and was amazed at what she said.
‘I have to know if my friend Gian in Boston – if he stopped my Jay and the boys coming here. He said he was going to call him, tell him not to come down – I have to know who’s here, I have to see –’
The man almost visibly relaxed. ‘Oh, sure, sure, I see – yeah, well, come on lady. I’ll take you up there. But it ain’t nice, I’ll tell you, it ain’t nice. Hey, Charlie!’ he called back over his shoulder. ‘Call the station, have ‘em send over a woman officer, okay? We’re goin’ to need one –’
And he began to walk down the drive and she followed him, keeping her head down and staring at the gravel as it spurted up beneath her shoes in little showers of grit, concentrating on just putting one foot in front of the other. How could she have done that? ‘Why did she do that? Why lie to save Giovale’s skin? They were dead, her boys and her Jay – they were dead and it was his doing, and she had lied about it. Why, how could she have done that?
Because it was your fault, her inner voice whispered. It was your fault. You who made Giovale do it, all your doing, you killed your children to spite Jay and get him back from the Costellos and in doing it you killed the only person in the entire world who is of any value at all.
The tears that were streaming down her face by the time she was standing in front of the small piles of sacking that were all that remained of the boys were not for them. She knew that. They were for herself. Because she had made it all happen, as she had made so many things in the past happen, and had lied about it. Just as she always had.
38
September 1987
‘Have you been watching television this week?’ He was asking the question almost before she had the front door open and she gaped at him as he came pushing his way in, his hair even more rumpled than usual and the collar of his rather shabby overcoat pulled high to his ears, for it was a windy, chilly evening.
Television? Not really. I haven’t had time. Why on earth –’
‘Good. I mean, I’m glad. I’ll have the chance to explain before you see it all. And it might have upset Maddie.’ He was shrugging out of his coat, pulling things out of its capacious pockets before he hung it up, a big padded envelope, a battered folder with papers in it.
‘What might have upset Maddie?’ She led the way into the living room, a little self-consciously because he hadn’t been here since she’d made the changes. She didn’t really care what he thought, of course, but all the same –
He stopped in the doorway and stared around. And then after a long pause said softly, ‘Oh, yes!’
‘Yes, what?’ She was trying to be nonchalant but it wasn’t easy, and she too looked round the room, trying to see it through his eyes. The walls, repainted to a soft lavender; the furniture with its new coverings in deep purple and the cushions piled on the sofa and armchairs in all the shades of red and blue she could find, from the palest pink through to the deepest purple, so that the total effect was of a vast bunch of anemones; the big long glass coffee table in the middle on which she had set the best of Jen’s knick-knacks, which looked surprisingly elegant there; and above all the new fire she had had installed. She had always been rather scornful of gas heaters with flames designed to simulate open coal fires, but this one was surprisingly authentic in appearance and it did complete what she knew to be a very pretty and comfortable room. The light of the flames flickered on the walls and the few good pictures she had hanging there, pleasantly supplementing the pools of soft pinkish light from the big table lamps she had set in two of the comers, on low glass tables of their own, and the sound of the Mozart she had playing on her new and very good player, which made the notes sound as though they were being produced right there in the room itself, all added up to an ambience of peace and comfort and, almost, luxury.
And he saw it just as she did, she knew, for he took a deep breath and let his shoulders relax a little and said, ‘This is lovely, Annie. How clever you are! May I sit down and just expire peacefully and never get up again?’
She laughed. ‘Absolutely not! Dead bodies lying around would quite ruin the effect. You may sit down and wait while I make you some coffee.’ And she left him there and crossed her little hallway to the kitchen to put the kettle on.
‘I’ve just remembered I forgot to have any supper,’ he called a little plaintively. ‘Could you stretch to a dry crust as well, maybe?’
And she smiled to herself but said nothing and went to the fridge to get the makings of sandwiches. There was some of that salmon left from their own supper and enough of the mayonnaise she had made to go with it to create a respectable plate of sandwiches, and she had some good granary bread; and whistling softly to accompany the Mozart, which sounded almost as good here in the kitchen as it did in the living room, she moved happily about, setting a coffee tray, slicing cucumber thinly to garnish his sandwiches, content to be purely domestic just for a while.
When she carried the tray into the living room, he was lying back in her deepest armchair with his eyes closed, his long legs stretched wide and his curly head thrown back against the pile of cushions and she stood and looked at him, thinking in a disjointed way of how comfortable he looked and how much a part of the room and how much she had actually enjoyed making sandwiches for him, and wondering what it might be like to do it often, all the time even; and then, annoyed with herself for thinking such stupidity, deliberately clattered the tray a little as she set it down on the glass table.
He didn’t open his eyes, staying
in just the same posture as he spoke. ‘This is very close to heaven, Annie. The smell of that coffee is pure ambrosia and the music is perfect and I’ll never ever want to be anywhere else. Could you put up with that?’
‘You’d need too much dusting,’ she said, and kept her head down. He was uncomfortably close to what she had been thinking and that was not to be considered. ‘When you came in you said something about upsetting Maddie. What did you mean?’
He dragged himself upright and grinned at her and then reached for the coffee she had poured for him. ‘What’s in those? Salmon? You are a magic lady, Annie. My favourite food bar none. I shall eat all of them, completely, and you shall watch me. I hope you wanted none for yourself, for you shan’t have any. I have a bad attack of greedy on me. Yes, I did say something about upsetting Maddie. I don’t want to. Where is she?’
‘Asleep. She gets tired early, so after supper I told her she ought to go to bed. Are you going to explain, or do I have to nag?’
He shook his head, his mouth full, and patiently she waited.
‘No, you don’t have to nag. I want to tell you. That’s why I came. But we have to decide what to tell Maddie about it. Let me finish this and then I’ll show you. Do you have a video machine?’ He reached for another sandwich for he had demolished the first at a great rate.
She looked over her shoulder at the television set in the corner. ‘Yes. I thought I might as well have one installed when I had the TV put in, though I’ve never used it. I think I might get rid of it, for all the use I make of it.’
‘Oh, you’ll get round to using it. We all succumb to technology’s artful lures eventually. Anyway, I’m glad you’ve got it now. There’s a video tape in that envelope. Do get it out and put it in the machine, and then when it’s ready and I’ve gobbled up the rest of these delectable sandwiches, I’ll explain what it’s all about.’
Obediently she took the tape from the envelope, and went over to the video machine in the corner and sat there with the instruction book on her lap, trying to work out how to operate the thing and fiddling with the remote control, and he watched her as he ate, and tried to concentrate only on what he had come here to tell her and not on his private thoughts at all, but it was almost impossible. She was looking so very much better; her hair had settled into its new cut and now framed her face, which was smoother and much less haggard than it had been, in a very attractive way, and her body looked better too, less bony and a great deal more relaxed. She was much too nice to look at altogether, he thought a little gloomily. Damn it all.
She looked up. ‘I think I’ve got it sussed. Now, what is this all about? Shall I switch on?’
‘In a moment.’ He stretched and lay back in his chair. ‘Come over here – you’ll get a squint if you sit as close as that.’
She laughed. ‘You sound like an elderly nanny,’ she said. The way Maddie’s Daphne would talk –’ She stood still suddenly, staring down at him, for she had been on her way to the armchair on the other side of him. ‘That’s a thought. I wonder what happened to her? She could still be a nanny, I suppose – how old would she be? She was about the same age as Maddie, wasn’t she? I think so – from the things Maddie has told me.’
‘Has she been talking a lot since she came here?’ He looked at her sharply as she settled herself in her chair, her own cup of coffee beside her.
‘She hasn’t stopped.’ Annie laughed then. ‘It’s been like a volcano, I swear to you. That’s why I’ve seen no television – I’ve done hardly anything at all but fix the flat and listen to Maddie. Actually, it’s been riveting. I’ve heard more about what the war was really like for people who had to live through it than I would have imagined possible – she was just a kid, you see, and it totally ruined things for her. Her education, her own life, it was all destroyed. Especially when her mother was killed.’
‘I imagine it must have been – but is that all she talked about? Nothing about the things she told us that last time? With the injection?’
She shook her head. ‘I’ve not encouraged her. I thought it was bad enough she went through it once. She needs time to recover, surely? Let her talk about the remote past, about being a child and her parents and so forth. Plenty of time to go back over that awful stuff again. You said that yourself.’
‘Yes, I did. But now –’ He shook his head. ‘Now I’m not so sure. It might be that we have to talk to her about the later things. And let her talk to us. The thing is, I set out to find out if it was all true. And it is.’
‘But I never doubted it was true,’ she said and stared at him. ‘Why did you?’
‘Because it was such an incredible story,’ Joe said. ‘Don’t you think?’
‘Why incredible? She did what she thought she had to. And it led to all that – a dreadful story, I grant you, but hard to believe? Far from it.’
‘You can imagine your mother doing what she did?’ he said softly and almost held his breath. She had been so much more relaxed an Annie since Maddie had left the hospital and come here to live at the flat, but all the same, there were still difficult areas; but she didn’t flare up as he had feared. She just sat and stared at him and then at the flames of her gas fire.
‘I don’t know,’ she said at length. ‘Possibly. She had the same sort of madness about her.’
‘Madness?’ Again he held his breath. Annie, to say that about Jennifer?
She lifted her chin and looked at him. ‘Yes. Madness. I used to get so angry if – well, now I don’t. It was a sort of madness to stick with him, with Colin, for so long. To lose so much and to – oh, the hell with it. Don’t want to talk about it. How did you find out? And what did you find out?’
‘What?’ He was startled by the change of mood. She had been so willing to talk lately; to find her sliding away in this way was like the bad old days.
‘You say you found out it’s all absolutely true. How did you find out? And why? Why did you doubt it? I thought that what people said when they had injections like that was always true. Didn’t they use to call them truth drugs?’
‘No matter what they called ‘em, they aren’t entirely. I’ve had patients who were so totally gripped by fantasy that even under abreactive drugs they clung to them. That was one of the reasons I wasn’t sure about using the method for Maddie. Now I’m damned glad I did, of course, but at the time – I wasn’t sure.’ He grinned. ‘There’s something to be said for being an eclectic practitioner after all. Our critics say it’s just that we don’t know what the hell we’re doing so we try any old thing, and we say we’re being flexible and open to ideas and responsive to individual patients’ individual needs. Sounds better that way, doesn’t it?’
‘So you doubted it when you heard it, even though she was in such a dreadful state? I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone so –’ She shivered suddenly. ‘It upset me a lot. I dreamed about it for ages afterwards. The way she screamed and cried and –’
‘You should see what happens with LSD,’ he said and grimaced a little. ‘Damn it, do I sound like a hardened old medic, couldn’t care less about people’s feelings? That’s not the way of it, you know. We care. It’s just that we get good at hiding it. And yes, I did doubt her. There was something – oh, I can’t explain, I just needed extra assurance. So I set out to get it.’
She looked sardonic now. ‘Private detectives? Seedy little men in seedy hats prowling around Boston and – where was it – Osterville, asking questions of oldies about do-you-remember-thirty-five-years ago?’
‘Nothing so complicated. I got it done for nothing. Seedy detectives need seedy money. And I’m just a poor old NHS psychiatrist. All I did was make a phone call to Boston. I did it out of hours to keep it cheap – and I used the hospital’s phone.’
She laughed aloud at that. ‘They’ll run you out of town on a rail! Spending government money on patients instead of bureaucracy? What a wicked misuse of taxpayers’ cash! Anyway, who did you call? Did you just look up Kincaid in the phone book and call the
family? I imagine there are some of them left.’
‘Oh, there are some of them left all right,’ he said and looked at her sideways. ‘One of them you know a good deal about.’
‘What?’ She stared at him. i know about? How? Who?’
‘The name doesn’t ring bells?’
‘Kincaid? Maddie’s the only person I know called Kincaid.’
‘That’s why I asked if you’d been watching television,’ he said. ‘Switch on that tape, will you?’
She stared at him for a long moment and then reached over to her record player and switched off the Mozart before picking up the video controller and peering at it before pressing the relevant buttons, and the TV screen glowed into life and showed a billiard table and balls being pushed around on it in a desultory fashion and she made a face. ‘Now you know why I hardly ever watch,’ she murmured. ‘Ah, here we go –’
The image shivered, changed and then became part of a news bulletin, and she watched as the newsreader finished talking about a teachers’ union dispute and then moved on to the next item.
‘In the United States, activity is rapidly increasing in the runup to the Presidential elections. Since the naked dancer row over the Senator from Minnesota which led to his surprise resignation from the race, there have been several other new appearances at the hustings. Our man in Washington reports –’
Maddie Page 40