Again the picture changed and there was the usual image of a man in a raincoat standing in front of the Capitol, clutching a handmike and pretending he was talking casually when he was quite clearly using a set of cues from which to read his comments, and she listened as he launched himself into an account of the various people involved in the forthcoming election. And her forehead creased in bewilderment and she looked at Joe and said, ‘What has this to do with –’
‘Hush,’ he said. ‘Wait and see.’
She lifted her brows at him, but turned back to the screen. ‘A sudden new appearance from a contender is the Senator from Massachusetts who was spoken of dismissively only three weeks ago as a no-hoper, but who has now come on at a very remarkable rate. His opponents have suggested that his family connections have been used to much greater effect than is to be admired, but can’t deny that he cuts an attractive figure on the television screens of the nation, where this election will undoubtedly be won – and lost. He has an appeal that is hard to deny –’
And again the scene changed and now there appeared a group of obvious politicians in the middle of the crowd, as one of them shouted into a microphone and onlookers waved and shrieked, though none of it could be heard as the voice of the commentator droned on.
‘– Timothy Bryan Kincaid the Second – he always insists on using the numeral, even though some people find it unpleasantly old-fashioned and smacking of an aristocratic attitude that should have no place in modern American politics, is pulling in support so much faster than his nearest competitors that the front runner, Senator Hansell Koenig, has made some distinctly sour comments on his ability as a politician as compared with his charm as a TV performer and –’
Annie was leaning forwards, staring at the screen with her mouth half open with surprise, and quietly Joe reached across and pointed.
‘You see the chap they’re talking about? The stocky one –’
She nodded. ‘He looks too young, though, to be the man Maddie talked about. He can’t be a day over forty, surely? And Jay’s brother would have been – well, older than Maddie. And she’s almost sixty, isn’t she?’
‘Fifty-seven,’ Joe said. ‘And this man is around sixty. Never underestimate the power of American dentistry and suntanning oils.’
‘Blond,’ Annie said and shivered. ‘Maddie said her Jay had hair like gold. I wonder if they were alike, the two of them? Maddie didn’t say, did she?’
‘They are now,’ Joe said very deliberately and she turned and stared at him, her eyes wide.
‘What did you say?’
‘They are now. Look at the chap behind him and to his left – there, beside that thin woman in the mink jacket – watch now.’ He had seized her shoulder and had his head very close to hers as he pointed at the screen and she was aware of the warmth of him against her face and, oddly, liked it as she let her gaze follow the line of his pointing finger and saw the man standing behind the speaker, who was still shouting his platitudes into the echoing microphone as his hearers waved and applauded. A bulky man, with hair that was dull, compared with the candidate’s, and rather thin as far as she could see, but still unmistakably blond; a jowly face in which the eyes seemed like slits, and certainly gave no hint of their colour, and a fixed watchful expression. The man stood there watching the crowd over the speaker’s head, as she caught her breath at that moment because suddenly there it was; an unmissable likeness between the two men. There could be no hint of doubt at all that she was looking at the Jay of whom she had heard so much.
Or could it be … and she turned to Joe and said, ‘Are you sure?’
‘Rewind the tape and look again,’ he said. ‘And you’ll see that you’re sure too.’
She fiddled with the control panel and managed to do as he said and then started to rerun it, and again the newsreader appeared to introduce the man in Washington, and she let it run as she said again, ‘Are you quite sure? Couldn’t it be the other one, what was his name? Declan?’
He shook his head. ‘My man in Boston comes in here. No, it couldn’t be. He’s dead. Got involved in some sort of business scam, apparently, and then died somewhat mysteriously and very conveniently, it seems, in a road accident. According to my chap –’
‘Who is your chap? Someone who really knows or –’
‘He knows. He’s on the surgical staff at Boston General – went down the brain drain ten years ago. I got him to look up the old newspapers there because I knew he’d enjoy it. He used to play at genealogies, for God’s sake, always helping people do their family trees when we were students. That’s what made me think of him when I wanted to check up on Maddie’s story. So I called him and yesterday he called me back and told me. The younger son Declan died, the sisters seem to have married various useful people as far as money and business connections are concerned and now, Dave Mercer tells me, the Kincaid empire is one of the vastest in the whole of the US, if carefully anonymous much of the time. And the man who runs it and controls it and has all the say in what goes on is Jay Bryan Kincaid. It was he, they say, who put his brother into the race for the Presidency and is pushing him hard. I saw another TV programme as well as this one I videoed to show you, in case you hadn’t seen it. So there you are. It’s all true. Because I got Dave to look at the old newspapers for ‘53 as well. The fire in Osterville was well covered – it caused a hell of a fuss at the time. Seventeen people – a lot of ‘em very powerful people – died as well as Costello and his daughter but some got away. Five of them, it seems. And one of them was Jay Kincaid.’
She turned her eyes back to the screen where once again the tape had reached the stage of showing Timothy Bryan Kincaid the Second at the height of his oratory and as the camera shifted its angle and at last Jay Bryan Kincaid again came into view she leaned forwards to stare again.
‘Annie?’ The voice behind her was so quiet she wasn’t sure she had heard it at all, and she looked over her shoulder to see Maddie standing in the doorway, her dressing gown pulled around her and her hair in a tangle over her sleep-crumpled face.
She was staring not at Annie but at the screen.
‘Who did you say that was?’
Desperately Annie fumbled with the control gadget, wanting to protect her, needing time to explain to her before letting her see, but as she tried to find the stop button and press it, her finger slipped and hit the pause button instead.
And the image on the screen flickered, almost rolled and then held. And it had frozen on a direct close-up of Jay, staring over his brother’s shoulder out into the room at the three of them.
39
September 1987
‘No,’ Annie said. ‘No, no, no. I won’t.’
‘Why not? What difference does it make to you? Why can’t you see how important it is? Why not? Please –’ And Maddie’s voice rose to a wail, and she tried to sit up on the sofa again.
But Annie pushed her back and made her lie still and Maddie lay there, her face so pale that her eyes looked black in it as she glinted up at her, and she could feel the fury and the anger in her – and at the same time something else. There was a calculating look in her eyes, a watchfulness, and Annie sat back on her heels beside the sofa and stared down at her.
It was almost two in the morning, and they had been talking now for what seemed like an eternity, and which had indeed been a matter of some hours. At first Joe had wanted to stay, seeing how Maddie had wept and gasped and wept again, and then he had wanted to give her some sort of sedative to get her through the rest of the night.
‘She’s likely to go on being pretty uptight for a while, Annie. Will you be able to cope? Dammit, I should have made sure she couldn’t hear and be disturbed when I started to show you that tape. It was stupid of me.’
‘She had to know sooner or later,’ Annie said. ‘And I think perhaps better sooner. I can deal with her. You go away and leave us alone. She’ll be all right.’
He had lingered at the front door of the little flat, staring over h
er shoulder at the back of Maddie’s head which could just be seen over the back of the sofa. She was sitting bolt upright and rocking to and fro and he grimaced at the sight of that.
‘Dammit, I was too hopeful,’ he murmured. ‘I thought we could really rehabilitate her, living here with you. But if she regresses again now she knows he’s alive then you won’t be able to – it wouldn’t be right to leave her with you. Too much of a burden. I’ll have to get her in somewhere, though God knows where. They’re emptying the acute unit now. There just isn’t a Greenhill left for all practical purposes. Just offices and records, that’s all. Certainly nothing that can give her any care –’
‘I’ll care for her,’ Annie said firmly and pushed him to the door. ‘Go, for pity’s sake. I’ll sort her out. Leave her to me.’
And she had been very optimistic that she could sort it out. After the first appalling few minutes when Maddie had recognised Jay, greatly changed though he was, and had wept and then laughed and wept again her huge relief that he was still alive, she had seemed to settle down and become calm. Annie had expected an outburst of – what? Renewed guilt, extra remorse over the boys, anger at Jay because they were dead and he as well as she had survived? But there had been none of that, just the storm of excitement, and then calmness, and at last Joe had agreed to go, and had left the two women alone, and she had gone slowly back to the living room to sit beside Maddie and talk to her.
For a while it had been a little like their very first weeks together. Maddie had sat and rocked and said nothing, keeping her eyes blank and fixed and rocking rhythmically, and Annie had talked and murmured and talked again until she was hoarse, trying to get her to come out of her almost trancelike state. And had just begun to be seriously worried that the shock of seeing that image on the TV screen had sent Maddie back headfirst into the maelstrom of her madness, when she had stopped her rocking and turned her head to Annie and said, ‘I’m going to him.’
‘I – what did you say?’ Annie had peered closely at her face in the low lights of the room, wanting to see how serious she was; surely she was being foolishly jocular, making an incomprehensible bad joke? But she wasn’t. Maddie’s eyes were blazing with excitement and her face had high patches of colour on it as she said it again. ‘I’m going to him.’
‘Going to where?’
‘To America. To Boston. To Jay. He’s mine – I have to go to him. I’ll need you to help me – money for tickets, things like that – you can help me with that, can’t you? Just a loan – Jay will return it as soon as he sees me. I’ll send the money back, or if you like, you can come too. Yes, that’d be better, you travel with me. You come to America with me, and when we see Jay he’ll be so grateful to you for bringing me back to him that he’ll not just pay the money you spent to get us there, he’ll give you lots more. Oh, please Annie, will you arrange it? Right away? I’ll need some clothes, too – I can’t go to him looking like this –’
And feverishly she had jumped to her feet and run to the bathroom, Annie close behind her, to stare at the mirror and pull her lank hair from her face and stare at herself closely.
‘I’ll have time for a facial and hairdo, won’t I? Yes, I must, and then we’ll both go to Boston and we’ll find Jay and oh, Annie, won’t it be wonderful at last? To be together again and –’
‘Shut up!’ Annie had roared at her, and gone running back to the living room to hurl herself into an armchair. ‘Shut up! I won’t listen to this – it’s the maddest thing I ever heard – you’re not going to Boston! If he’d wanted you, he’d have come to find you long ago. You’re a fool to think be gives a damn about you, or wants ever to see you again – you’re not fit to go alone, you’re not fit to go at all. And I’m not taking you –’
And then it had begun – the pleading, the cajoling, the shouting and the threatening as Maddie tried everything she knew, every word she could lay her tongue to to make Annie do what she wanted. And Annie had sat there refusing steadily until at last Maddie had hurled herself on to the sofa in a flood of frustration and tears.
And Annie had sat and watched and waited, thinking she would weep herself into a sleep of exhaustion and they could both get some rest and regain some sense. But that hadn’t happened. Eventually Maddie had rolled over on to her back and started again, not shouting this time, nor pleading, but offering calm reasoned words, simple obvious explanations of why it was the most sensible thing in the world for her to go to Boston and see her husband. Was she not the man’s wife? Hadn’t he had the same thirty-five years of misery as she, wondering where she was, what had happened to her? Hadn’t he been longing for her as much as she had been longing for him? They had to be together – they were meant for each other, he was the centre of her life, the only person who made it worth living. How could Annie keep them apart? How could she? It was only lack of understanding that deterred her; only her own misfortune in never having so great, so vital, so powerful a love; and all the time Maddie’s voice was so reasonable and patient. Why not? Why could Annie not see how important it was? It was all so rational, so necessary, so inevitable; why could she not understand?
And finally, at two in the morning, Annie’s patience snapped. She looked at the white face on the sofa cushions, framed in the lovely anemone colours of which she had been so proud and which now looked to her sickly and ugly, magenta and puce, not soft lilac and violet, and hated her.
She hated the words she used. She hated the wide-eyed explanations of how deeply she loved this man. She hated the way Maddie explained how much she needed him, how important he was to her.
And she found herself deep inside her own memory, listening to her mother Jennifer, as she stood behind her at her dressing table as she did night after night, brushing her hair, because Annie was to grow up beautiful, like her father, and have lovely curly rich hair like his; and while she brushed she would talk, just as Maddie had been talking, of the way she loved this one man and could never love any other.
Of how important it was for a woman to have so grand a passion in her life. Of the wonder of yielding all your feelings to just one man for ever. Of the way the only women who mattered were those like herself, one-man women who gave a lifetime of devotion where they had given their hearts. Of the glory of suffering for a man who was worth loving …
‘And one day, my darling Annie, one day you will be a beautiful lady and you will find a man to love as I love your daddy. Maybe you’ll be lucky and he will be able to live with you all the time and take care of you but it won’t matter if he can’t, because you’ll have him to love and that’s all a woman needs – to have a great passion is to be alive and to be real and to be important –’
And her Irish voice had lilted on and on and Annie, young Annie, had sat and listened and hated her for saying it all, hated what she was being told and felt sick with fear that Jen might be right, that it might be true.
And now Maddie, saying the same things over and over again, pleading to go to a man who had used her so ill that she had lost all sight of the woman she was meant to be and had turned into a manipulating scheming creature who couldn’t even see when she had been cruel, who couldn’t understand that others had loves and needs and feelings too, who put her own ridiculous grand love above every other person in the entire world and –
And she lifted her hand and swung back her arm and let all her fury and her fatigue and her grief for her mother as well as for Maddie herself come pouring down from her shoulders to her fingertips, and she let all the power she had loose on it; and as her fingers struck Maddie’s face with a resounding crack that made her fingers tingle and then burn and which left her muscles all down her arm aching, she felt the flood of her own tears erupt.
‘You stupid, wicked bitch,’ she howled. ‘You bloody fool! He was a bastard and he still is a bastard because they never change – you hear me? They never change – but you’re worse than he is, lying to yourself, destroying your life for him, destroying everything because of him, you’
re wicked, wicked, wicked – I hate you, you hear me? I hate you!’ And then the tears choked her and no more words would come and she reached forwards and took Maddie’s shoulders in each hand and began to shake her.
‘You’re worth more than this, you’re worth more, don’t do it, don’t destroy yourself again – don’t do it. He’s not worth it, he never was, he still isn’t, don’t do it –’
And then she was holding Maddie close, wrapping both her arms about her and holding her as she wept and rocked, trying to make her understand how much she cared about her, how important it was she should detach herself from this stupid passion she had allowed to consume her all these years, forgiving her for all she had ever done and loving her for what she was; a woman worth loving.
And wasn’t all that surprised to find after a while that it had all changed and she wasn’t holding Maddie and comforting her and trying to beg her pardon for hitting her and hurting her. Maddie was holding her, and rocking her gently as she wept on her shoulder and let all her grief for Jen, poor sad dead Jen, tumble out on Maddie’s dressing-gowned shoulder.
40
January 1988
Maddie, contented. Walking each morning to the town centre with her shopping trolley bumping along the pavement behind her, to buy the things they needed, watching the traffic and the people, the trees and the birds, the dogs and the children, and liking all she saw, however commonplace.
Maddie, working, cleaning the flat and finding it agreeable to polish and wash and iron clothes. Revelling in the long hours spent over a cookery book in the small kitchen while she planned the supper she would have ready for Annie when she came home. Washing up, making their beds, looking after the window boxes, tugging out the weeds, rejoicing when the flowers managed to emerge, grieving when they didn’t, and turning over the soil industriously either way. Sweeping the stairs outside the flat and actively enjoying it.
Maddie Page 41