Walking Alone

by Carolyn McCrae

  After they had all sat down with a coffee Mary tried to make conversation, asking if Graham’s family were local.

  “No. We come from London but we do have local connections. Quite close connections really.”

  “But you don’t live here?”

  “I work in Liverpool but I spend a lot of time in Hoylake. My aunt lived here for some years, though she died a couple of years ago.” The politeness and inconsequentiality of the conversation raised, rather than lowered, the tension.

  “And your uncle?” Matt decided to join in the game.

  “I believe he died some years ago. It is my cousins I have been looking forward to getting to know.”

  “Would we know them?” Mary had no idea what was going on.

  “I believe you do.”

  “Matt? Do you know who he’s talking about?”

  “Oh yes.”

  Mary knew Matt so well. She knew how he spoke when he was trying to pick an argument with her, how he asked short questions and gave short answers as he waited for her to fall into the traps he laid. She realised that that was what he was doing now, with this friend of Holly’s.

  Graham changed tack “You come from Toronto don’t you? Originally I mean.”

  “Yes, why yes I did.”

  “How long ago did you leave?” Only Matt realised this was not a natural development of their polite conversation.

  “Oh years ago, just after Holly was born.”

  It was when he asked Mary “Do you have much contact with your parents?” and he caught Matt’s eye, that Graham realised he had gone too far.

  Mary was watching them both. “You two know each other don’t you.” She turned to Graham, “You’re not here for Holly’s birthday at all are you?”

  Holly looked at her Mother. What was going on? How could her Dad know Graham?

  “Of course I am.” Graham’s lie was unconvincing.

  “You didn’t say you were coming. Why are you here?” Holly was remembering the warnings Linda had given her ‘Graham is devious.’ ‘Graham knows a lot more than he should’ ‘Graham wants something, I don’t know what, but he wants something from us.’

  “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have come. I just wanted to wish Holly a Happy Birthday. I’ll leave now.” Graham could do a very good contrite act when he chose.

  “Oh no, don’t leave yet.” Mary ignored the fierce looks her husband and daughter were giving her, she wanted to know what this young man was really after. “Have a drink. She looked at her watch. “It’s Holly’s birthday until noon and then we have Christmas. Silly really, but it means that she gets some time to celebrate and open her presents before the rest of it all kicks in. Stay till our Christmas begins.” She had carried on talking as she walked to the cabinet and got a glass, filled it with the final drops of Champagne from the bottle and handed a quarter full glass to him. “We haven’t got off to the best of starts have we? Cheers!”

  “Cheers. Happy Birthday Holl.” He walked across the room, his back to her parents and, kissing her on the mouth, swiftly inserted his tongue deep into her mouth. He handed her a small parcel wrapped in silver paper.

  “Thank you Graham. Do I open it now or after 12?”

  “Now.”

  “Is it OK? In front of …” she spoke quietly and shrugged towards her parents who were watching closely.

  He nodded and so she undid the tape. Inside was a jeweller’s box and her imagination raced. He couldn’t be giving her a ring? Could he? That would be stupid, especially in front of her parents. She didn’t want to open the box in case it was something she wouldn’t be able to accept or explain, so she hesitated. Graham took it from her hands and opened it. He took the contents out before she could really see them and signalled with his hand for her to turn around. She did.

  She felt uncomfortable, and for a moment she felt fear, then she realised he was fastening a silver chain around her neck. She lifted the charm, looked at it, and seeing it was a swastika, rapidly tried to undo the clasp of the chain.

  “What’s that for? Graham! How could you?”

  Graham smiled condescendingly. “It’s not what you think.” He briefly caught Matt’s eye and seemed to challenge him to react as he kept Holly from undoing the hook. “It’s an ancient Hindu symbol of well-being Holly, a good luck charm. I wanted you to wear it to keep you safe when you’re not with me.”

  “I think you’d better go.” Mary thought she spoke for her whole family. Holly realised what Graham was doing. He was proving to her that what he had said about her father’s past was true and the fact that he must know even more than he had told her. His presence was unsettling them all.

  “I’ve got to go now anyway. Thank you for the coffee and the drink Mrs Eccleston. I’ll see you in the New Year.” He was polite, acting as if nothing untoward had occurred.

  Matt stood up but Graham had let himself out.

  Holly removed the chain from her neck and tried to explain to her parents that she wasn’t interested in Graham. “I hardly know him. I met him at that funeral in January.”

  “So how do you know him?” Mary turned to Matt. Holly silently echoed her mother’s question and waited for the answer.

  “I’ve seen him in the pub. We have a few drinks together now and again. Just a coincidence he knows Holly too.”

  It almost seemed reasonable.

  Because they had been away at Christmas the Forsters invited the Ecclestons to lunch on the first Sunday in the New Year.

  Matt didn’t want to go and did the one thing he thought would save him the trouble of doing something he didn’t want to do, he got drunk. As soon as breakfast was finished he helped himself to a beer from the fridge and when Mary asked him not to he swore at her and so she left him alone. She would see how he was in a couple of hours.

  Pat was not surprised that only Holly and Mary appeared. Matt’s drink problem was almost taken for granted.

  Just as they were about to sit down for lunch Linda offered to go round and make sure Matt didn’t want to join them.

  “I’ll go.” Mary didn’t want anyone outside the family to see what Matt could be like so she slipped out and through the gap in the hedge into her back garden.

  She was surprised to hear voices in the kitchen.

  “You’re so fucking fixated with the Austrian you haven’t looked any closer to home have you?” What was Graham doing here?

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “What about the fucking O’Dwyers?” They were talking about her parents.

  “What about them?”

  “I told you. I knew you were pissed but I thought you’d remember the small matter of a few million.”

  Mary was amazed at the way Graham was talking to Matt. He was swearing at him, bullying him. She couldn’t believe anyone could talk to him like that.

  “Irish bloody losers. Scum of the earth the fucking Irish.”

  “Did you know them? Did you do anything other than piss them off marrying their daughter? Did you never bother to find out anything about them or did you just think ‘Irish’ ‘rubbish’ ‘no use to anyone’? Everyone reckons I’m an insignificant, thick pisshead but I did find out about them, I did bother to find out and they are loaded. Millions, they’ve got fucking millions and when they pop off it’ll all go to your dearly beloved wife.” Mary knew her parents had money, they had always worked so hard, had invested all their time in the business. But ‘millions’? Yes, she could almost believe that.

  “How? I don’t understand. What do you mean ‘fucking millions’?”

  “I told you last week. They’ve got property. They own property, apartment blocks, office buildings the whole bit.”

  “I didn’t understand. I didn’t remember.”

  “Well if you weren’t out of your head all the time you might remember. If you don’t get yourself together and do what you promised to do you won’t get a fucking farthing. I’m getting a little impatient waiting.”

  Mary backed away
and slipped back through the hedge before her husband, or Graham, could see her. She tried to make sense of it. Graham and Matt were up to something. She had just got back into the room and shrugged her shoulders at Pat’s unspoken enquiry when the door bell rang. It was obvious to everyone that Matt was the worse for wear but he seemed to be doing his best to behave. She wondered if the look he gave her meant he had spotted her in the garden and knew she had overheard them, but he didn’t say anything so perhaps it was just her guilty conscience.

  Conversation was limited during the meal, but no table could be entirely quiet when the twins were around. Oliver did his best to keep Matt from making too great a fool of himself by talking to him almost non-stop in a steady calming voice, by handing him the cutlery and taking his glass from him so it was never in danger of spilling. Crispin made it his job to keep Mary and Holly occupied so that they would not notice too much and would forget their embarrassment and enjoy themselves as far as possible.

  After lunch Linda, Holly and the boys were sprawled out on the floor playing Monopoly. Gradually Holly relaxed and joined in with the shrieks of ‘Ooh’ and ‘That’s not fair’ and ‘You can’t do that’.

  “I like Christmas and the New Year,” Crispin said to no one in particular “we can act idiotic and no one complains.”

  The cries of ‘Mayfair! That’s loads of money!’ kept Mary from forgetting the conversation between Matt and Graham. She had realised on Christmas Day that they knew each other but it seemed that it wasn’t friendship between them. Whatever it was was something to do with her.

  She jumped when she saw the face in the window. She glanced around the room to see if anyone else had noticed but it seemed not. Mary had her back to the window, all the others, except Matt, were on the floor. Matt was asleep, sitting opposite her, his eyes were shut and his head bent slightly forward. She really didn’t want Graham to make a scene so she left the room. She hoped no one would see them in the dark of the garden.

  But Matt had opened his eyes when he heard Mary moving and he had seen the face. He stood up unsteadily and followed his wife. Standing in the kitchen he could hear what was said

  “What do you know about him really? Ask him about August. Go on. Ask him about August. August is very important.”

  “What do you mean ‘ask him about August’? What did he do in August? Which August?” Mary seemed bewildered.

  Matt pushed Mary out of the way, facing up to Graham.

  But Graham wasn’t going to stay around and he ran towards the back gate with Matt stumbling to get after him, leaving Mary to head back to the house.

  “He just arrived from nowhere.” Mary was clearly upset. “He didn’t want to see you Holly, he wanted to see me. He just ranted on at me about Matt and how much he knew about Matt that we didn’t. I don’t know what he was talking about. He kept going on about August and I should ask him about August.”

  Holly had been prepared to keep seeing Graham to find out what was going on but he made no effort to see her through the whole of the next term. He phoned her every week or so to remind her that he knew things she didn’t but told her nothing new and told her to wait for the Summer. He’d tell her more in the summer.

  In her regular phone calls home Linda was keeping her family informed of Holly’s relationship with Graham. Crispin knew that however much he wanted to tell Holy she was making a mistake having anything to do with Graham, he must wait. ‘Give her time’ Oliver told him, ‘she’d see sense in the end’, ‘if she didn’t see through the little shit she didn’t deserve anything better’. Crispin knew it made sense when Linda, Oliver and Carl all talked at him about it. But he didn’t have to like it.

  “Well make sure she comes round for Easter with us. It won’t be fair if I can’t see her at all.” They took pity on him and Pat agreed to invite the Ecclestons for Easter Sunday lunch but Mary insisted they all go round to Number 16. “We owe you for New Year,” she had replied “and Matt might find it easier, you know, on his own ground. I’ll do a proper roast turkey, all the trimmings. It’ll be just like Thanksgiving.”

  “Are you sure? There’s an awful lot of us.”

  “It’ll be lovely having a house full and, hopefully, some laughter.” Mary wasn’t sure how Matt would react to her inviting so many people round but he was remarkably relaxed about it. “I’ll enjoy that.” He had said, which surprised both his wife and his daughter.

  As they gathered in the lounge before the meal everyone seemed to be on their best behaviour. Mary was working in the kitchen, trying to forget how Pat had said that Jeff always cooked their ‘big roasts’. She could have done with some help but she knew Matt would never help her and Holly’s job was to entertain their guests whilst keeping an eye on her father’s behaviour, Matt was already more than half drunk before their guests arrived.

  Trying to make conversation Pat asked Matt how his book was coming along but was unprepared for the anger her polite enquiry caused.

  “What do you know about a book? What’s that bitch told you about a book?”

  Pat had learned from her work with young delinquents that the best way to cope with this sort of excessive behaviour was to remain calm and polite, to ignore the details of what was said and to pay compliments to the ego of the angry person.

  “She has told me that you have been working very hard on your research, spending a lot of time in the library, and in Liverpool.”

  Pat didn’t add that recently Mary had confided in her that, although he was out all day every day, she had no idea how much he’s written or what he was writing about. She thought he spent most of his time drinking. Matt had not gone into any detail about the book since he had first given its existence as his excuse for spending so much time out of the house.

  “OK so I’m writing a book. Big fucking deal. All the years I’ve catalogued every cheap little shit who can string two words together. I want the name ‘Matthew Eccleston’ to be an entry even if it’s just once. I want every other sodding library cataloguer to have to put me on their lists.”

  Other conversation in the room stopped but Matt immediately calmed down. His outburst immediately forgotten he continued in a perfectly calm voice “Now you all know it’ll be that much more pressure on me to finish it and to get it published. If you hadn’t known it wouldn’t be so bad if it had come to nothing.”

  Mary had taken great care about where everyone would sit around the table, she had discussed this with Pat and they had decided they couldn’t let everyone sit just where they wanted. They wanted to make sure that Carl had neither Holly nor Linda next to him. Just in case it caused a problem with the other one when they seemed to be getting on so much better, and they couldn’t put him through the ordeal of having one on either side.

  “Too many men!” Mary laughed, rather falsely, as she ushered everyone into the dining room. “Holly, Linda, you go on either side of Jeff at that end. Mary, you sit next to me; Carl, since you are the rarest of guests, you come and sit on my other side.” That left Matt, Crispin and Oliver to occupy the two seats between Holly and Carl and the one between Linda and Mary.

  It seemed very contrived but no one made any comment as the door bell had rung and instead, as Mary went to answer it, the conversation was all about who would be rude enough to visit this time on Easter Sunday.

  “Not another refugee from home I hope.” Jeff joked, looking meaningfully at Carl, who had appeared at their house at Sunday lunchtime nearly ten years before.

  “You had pork not turkey.”

  “And there was no crackling left.”

  Holly was wondering what had happened to her mother. Several minutes had passed and she was getting worried. Surely, surely, Graham couldn’t do it again.

  As the minutes passed she was not the only one who was worried. “I’ll see how your Mother’s getting on, perhaps there was no one at the door and she’s struggling in the kitchen!” Carl left the table. Oliver and Crispin were telling Holly how Carl had come into their lives,
playing up their chivalry and playing down Carl’s misery. It was a story she had heard from Linda many times so she didn’t listen carefully, instead she was straining to hear what was going on in the hall.

  It was some time before Mary and Carl returned.

  “That was really odd.”

  “Who was it?”

  “It was Graham Tyler. He said he was in the area and had called in ‘on the off-chance’ to say ‘Hello’. It took all my charm to make him go away!”

  “Are you all right Mary? You look like you’ve seen a ghost!” Jeff was not the only one around the table who had noticed how shocked Mary appeared.

  Carl came to her rescue. “He’s an odd bod that Graham. I’ve seen him quite a lot around the race circuits. He always comes up to talk to me, even when he’s got nothing to say.” Crispin noticed the look Linda gave Holly whose face registered only dismay. “Anyway,” Carl continued “I’ve sent him away. Told him it was a family meal and he even had the cheek to ask if there was room for another one! He really didn’t want to take ‘no’ for the answer.”

  “What on earth could he possibly want this time?” everyone turned to look at Holly.

  “Well I didn’t ask him. I didn’t know you were all coming round until yesterday, how could I have told him?”

  “No one’s blaming anyone for anything. Come on. Someone help me get it all in from the kitchen before it all gets cold and all my hard work goes to waste.”

  “I don’t think he comes to see me.” Holly eventually raised the subject of Graham at breakfast the next morning. “We don’t have that sort of relationship.”

  “Well what sort of relationship do you have?” Matt wanted to know.

  “What’s happening in August?” Mary interrupted before Holly could answer her father.

  “I don’t know! How should I know? It’s months away.”

  Matt was more restrained in his response “Why?”

  “Graham always asks me to ask you about August. It’s what he said back in January, he kept saying it yesterday.”

  “What exactly did he say?”

  “He keeps going on about August, and someone called Rebecca. That’s twice now. I’m getting fed up with it.”