by Jane Renshaw
‘Yes. There was someone – did you see anyone, out here?’
He shook his head. ‘What happened?’
She hadn’t washed her hands. The thought hit her as she saw herself, suddenly, through his eyes – a middle-aged woman with chopped-short hair and a pasty fluey face, no make-up, in a wrinkled shirt and creased jeans; and with unwashed hands hanging at her sides.
How could he possibly know they were unwashed?
She couldn’t stop staring at him: at the straight, classical lines of nose and brow and jaw; the subtle athleticism of the lean young body; the pale blue shirt, the chinos, the expensive-looking leather belt and polished brown leather shoes; the hair that, in shadow and sunlight, was all colours from nut-brown through ochre to gold. And no way had he got that haircut at Tanya’s Tresses.
The girl had arrived at his side: rosy-cheeked, with layered messy hair and bright purple eyeshadow. Trainers with no socks. She looked terrified.
Helen took a breath. ‘I – someone was in there. Banging on the door. Of the cubicle. I’d gone in to – to do the obvious, but then someone started banging on the door. I thought it was going to give way.’ She swallowed. ‘I’m sorry – I probably completely overreacted – it was probably just kids.’
‘That’s horrible,’ said the girl.
‘I’d have been screaming too,’ said Narcissus.
‘You didn’t see anyone?’ Helen said.
‘No.’
‘You didn’t see a man...? I’ve got a photo – It’s in my bag – can you wait a minute while I –’
She’d left her bag in the cubicle. She hurried back into the toilets, but before going into the cubicle she stopped at the sinks and quickly turned on a tap and held her hands under the water. There was no soap. No towels. She shook her hands and wiped them on her jeans, leaving damp streaks that made it obvious what she’d been doing.
They hadn’t followed her along the passage. She could hear them talking in low voices. She couldn’t make out what they were saying, but she could imagine: Nutter.
She flushed the toilet, grabbed her bag and hurried back out into the sun. She pulled out one of the photos of Moir. ‘You didn’t see this man?’
‘No...’ the girl said. ‘But we’ve just remembered that when we were parking –’ she waved a hand in the direction of the road ‘– Connor Sinclair and his pal were messing about at the Buchans’ gate. It could have been them.’
‘Did it sound like ten-year-olds?’ said Narcissus.
She shook her head, her hand closing round the photograph. ‘He could still be out here.’
‘Safety in numbers,’ Narcissus said, absently, as if his attention was already wandering. But then: ‘You think he’s followed you here from Edinburgh?’
And as she blinked in confusion –
‘I’m assuming you’re Helen.’ He smiled, and Helen could do nothing else but smile back, and think how unfair, how unequal the world was, that he should have that smile on top of everything else.
‘I – yes –’
‘You’re Helen Clack?’ said the girl.
‘Sorry,’ said Narcissus. ‘This isn’t a mass break-out of stalking or anything. I’m Damian Forbes. Hector’s brother. Fiona told us what happened. What that bastard did to you.’
No.
No no no.
You’re not my little Stinker. You’re not my little cushie-doo.
‘And this is Anna,’ he said.
‘Anna Tait,’ said the girl.
‘You’re Damian?’
No. Damian was a sweet, chubby-faced boy – rather awkward, rather puppyish – who loved watching birds and grubbing about doing nerdy things in the woods. He was in the school chess club. He wore old sweaters and cargo pants and muddy walking boots. He probably still had a skull collection. He was NatureDork.
He wasn’t this. This escapee from the pages of a glossy magazine.
The smile had returned full force. ‘Yes, I think the last time we met I was probably dribbling all over you. Shall we get out of here? I always thought there was something creepy about these toilets.’
He stepped back to let Helen and Anna precede him.
Anna said, ‘You think this guy is really Rob Beattie?’ and Helen answered something, and all the while she was thinking: this is Hector’s little brother?
The shock of it had momentarily displaced every other conscious thought. It was like the shock, almost, of a bereavement. The Damian she’d had in her head all this time – he was gone. Hector’s sweet little brother. Her darling baby boy. And in his place was –
Irina’s son.
Well of course. Much more than he was Hector’s brother, he was Irina’s son. And so this was what he was like. Irina would have made sure of that. She’d send him to her father’s tailor in the Rue de Whatever, and buy him designer shirts, and pay hundreds of pounds for his haircuts. And show him off at dinner parties with aristocrats and politicians and filmstars and all the beautiful people.
What on earth must Hector make of him?
What would Suzanne have said?
Probably: Way to go Stinker.
‘Are you on holiday?’ she said, turning to him, searching his face for any trace of their Damian. His lashes, maybe – he had the same long brown lashes that baby Damian had had, but apart from that – nothing. Their Damian’s eyes had been bright blue, like Irina’s – this Damian’s were a smoky blue-grey. The Laird’s eyes.
‘Yes, we go back in August.’
For his last year of school. It was ludicrous to think of him as a schoolboy. But maybe in the poshest, most sophisticated parts of Paris they were all like this.
But he was here, at least. Visiting Hector, presumably. So she’d been wrong about them not being in contact. And they must get on, to some extent, if he came for holidays.
She carried on walking, across the playground, and at her side he said, ‘I gather the Beatties are saying it’s not him? That Moir Sandison isn’t Rob?’
How did he know all this? ‘Yes. I mean, yes, that’s what they’re saying.’
‘Although we are talking people who believe in supernatural beings, so their opinion isn’t maybe the most reliable.’
‘Tch,’ said Anna, on his other side. ‘Believing in God isn’t believing in a “supernatural being”.’
‘What is it then?’
So Irina had let her son grow up an atheist?
They’d reached the gates. Impostor Damian held the right-hand gate open, and snibbed it behind them, and looked down at his hand, as if wondering what it was doing messing about with school gates when it should have been caressing the curves of bee-stung-lipped girls. There were some rusty flakes of paint on it, she saw, but instead of just wiping them off on his clothes he took a perfect white square of handkerchief from his trouser pocket, and opened it, and used that. Then he shook the handkerchief, folded it again, and replaced it in his pocket.
‘OCD,’ said Anna to Helen in a stage whisper.
‘Yes,’ said Damian, looking up the road towards the shops. ‘Relative to someone who considers a compost heap a snack opportunity, I’m practically Howard Hughes.’
She looked where he was looking. Had he seen something? No – there were just two women outside the shoppie. She looked the other way. No one.
‘Um, hello, bananas have skins? And they weren’t even on the compost heap.’
‘No, sorry, that’s right – the rats had dragged them to one side.’ He looked at Helen. ‘He’s not going to try anything here, is he? Not in full public view.’
‘No.’
‘We have to pick up our friend from Lorna’s shop, then we’ll be going back your way to Anna’s, so we can give you a lift if you like?’ He waved a hand at a car parked at the curb just beyond the school.
And yes, of course it would be a sleek convertible, metallic midnight blue, top down, gleaming, pristine. Irina written all over it.
‘Thanks very much, but I’ve got my uncle’s pick-up.’
‘Well – thank you. I don’t, to be honest.’ She took a breath. ‘It’s a wonderful car. And isn’t it immaculate.’
He smiled and shrugged and said yes, he was pretty much OCD about that too.
The dashboard was shiny wood of some sort, the seats beautiful soft-looking black leather. Inside and out, it was showroom spotless. But Impostor Damian hadn’t stopped. He was already half way up the apron of tarmac outside the two shops. Bored already, it seemed, with the conversation. Their Damian wouldn’t have been. Their Damian would have been all eager and enthusiastic about his car, and all happy that she was interested. Although he might not keep it so clean. There’d be mud all over it, and a tank of toads on the back seat.
‘Birthday present,’ said Anna. ‘I considered myself lucky to get a laptop – he gets a Mercedes convertible… Are you OK?’
‘I feel a bit... light-headed. Maybe if I could sit down.’
And then she was upstairs in Lorna’s little kitchen, sitting at the table looking across the fields as Lorna ran the tap and shook shortbread onto a plate. From downstairs the teenagers’ voices drifted in and out of audibility.
‘It’ll’ve been that little thug Connor Sinclair,’ said Lorna, fussing about with glasses and ice. She set two coasters down on the table, and on each a glass of water. ‘But you think it was Rob. Banging on the door of the toilet, in some bizarre re-enactment of what happened thirty-odd years ago?’
‘I don’t know. But last night, there was someone prowling round the Mains – They took the wheels off my car –’
‘And that was Rob too. Helen, listen to yourself! You’re obsessed with Rob, with the idea that he was some kind of... evil psychopath. But he wasn’t.’
Helen put the cool glass to her forehead.
‘He could be really nasty. Of course he could. I was his sister. I know what he was capable of. And what he wasn’t.’
‘No you don’t.’
‘I wouldn’t be surprised if it was Damian, banging on the door to freak you out.’
‘Damian?’
Lorna gave a sudden, weary laugh and sat down, turning her glass on its coaster, running a finger through the condensation. ‘I suppose you think that because he’s Hector’s brother he can do no wrong.’
‘I don’t think anything of the sort. I’ve only just met him.’ Helen took a long gulp of cold water. ‘Why would you think it was him?’
Lorna carried on wiping the condensation from her glass. ‘He was there, wasn’t he?’
And he and Anna obviously knew all about what had been happening to her.
‘Damian’s very like Irina, isn’t he?’
‘Mm. Bit of an elephant in the room, that one.’
She felt light and queer and floaty. Maybe she just needed some food. She took a piece of shortbread from the plate. Lorna was looking at her as if she expected a reaction, so Helen said, ‘Elephant in the room?’
‘We all just pretend she never existed. We’re good at that sort of thing round here.’
It took a moment to penetrate, the sense of it. ‘Irina’s dead?’
46
‘Oh no. Much as certain people might wish she was. She high-tailed it off back to France or Italy or wherever after the accident, never to be heard of again. Not exactly Irina’s idea of fun, being lumbered with a disabled child.’
‘She had another child? So what –’
‘No no. You really are out of touch, aren’t you? I mean Damian.’
‘Damian, downstairs?’
‘Well, there is only one. Thank God.’
Helen’s hands were shaking. She put down the shortbread. ‘But he isn’t disabled.’
Lorna laughed. ‘It doesn’t tend to be the first thing people notice about him.’
‘But –’
‘The old Laird was killed in a car crash nine years ago – you knew that? Well, Damian was in the car too. His leg was mangled. The foot had to be amputated – you can imagine Irina’s reaction to that – and it was obvious the rest of the leg wasn’t going to function properly. She’d have sent him back for a new one if she could, but that not being an option, she threw her toys out of the pram and ran back home to Mummy and Daddy. Mrs MacIver and all that lot claimed it was a “nervous breakdown”, but she obviously just didn’t want the hassle.’
For a long moment Helen couldn’t say anything. Then: ‘Irina... went off and left him?’
‘She went mental when the surgeon said they’d have to amputate the foot, and wouldn’t give her consent – the surgeon went ahead anyway, he had to, and while the operation was going on Irina flounced off. There was no one else there. I think friends had been with her initially but Irina had told them to go. The hospital staff didn’t think to try and contact anyone else because they didn’t realise that Irina had just up and left. Hector was abroad at the time – it took him a while to get back. So there was no one there when Damian woke up. Apart from nurses and people, obviously. Like a headline in one of those awful magazines: Model Mum Dumps Disabled Child.’
So all the time she’d had them living in the cosy little world she’d constructed for them – All the time –
‘It was Hector to the rescue, naturally. There’s an aunt and uncle on the west coast with children not much older than Damian – they offered to take him to live with them – but oh no, Hector has to play the martyr. Has to give up his glamorous lifestyle in Rio de Janeiro or wherever to stay at Pitfourie and nurse him – although he’d never shown much interest in the kid up till then. And never mind what would have been the better option for Damian. That was of secondary importance.’ She took a sip of water. ‘It’s always been a power thing for Hector, though, hasn’t it, this compulsion to control people’s lives? One big ego trip.’
‘Hector’s been looking after him, all this time?’
‘What else he’s been doing, of course, is another question.’ Pause for wide-eyed What do you mean?
But there was no room in Helen’s mind for anything but the horror of what she’d just been told, and abhorrence for the woman sitting opposite.
Rob Beattie’s sister.
She was saying now, ‘Have you met any of his more – unusual employees?’
‘I haven’t met any of them, usual or unusual.’
A wail from downstairs, and laughter, increasing in volume as steps pounded on the stairs and the door came open and Anna was beaming at them, and saying, ‘We’ll get off now. Is that okay?’
Lorna looked at her watch. ‘No, it’s not “okay”. Karen has ten more minutes to work before she can leave.’
‘She says she was in ten minutes early this morning.’
‘It’s not flexitime. This might come as a shock to Karen, but the world doesn’t revolve entirely around her social life.’
‘No. Okay.’
‘Or am I supposed to leave an ill person up here and staff the shop myself for the remaining time? Even though it’s meant to be my day off?’
‘No. Right. Sorry.’
The footsteps retreated back down the stairs.
‘They’ve just got no idea, these girls. They think a holiday job in a shop’s going to be a right laugh. If she was left to her own devices, Karen would spend all her time on i-thingummies of one sort or another. Regardless of whether there were customers. I’m paying her at this moment, out of my own pocket, to lounge about talking to her friends. They’re always in here. Like I’m running a youth group.’
Helen would have liked to reach with both hands across the table and take fistfuls of that perfectly groomed hair and yank it.
Who had told him? About his father? About his injuries? A nurse? Some sort of counsellor? Or had they waited for Hector to get there? How long had it taken, for Hector to find out what had happened and get home? What must that journey have been like? And when he got to the hospital and found out that Irina had gone, and Damian had been alone all that ti
me –
Lorna, she realised, had stopped speaking and was expecting a response.
Helen said flatly: ‘That’s teenagers for you.’
‘Yes, but I’d rather not be subsidising it.’ She shrugged. ‘Damian often buys something. That’s the problem. So Karen can say they’re “customers”.’
‘What does he buy?’
‘Oh, anything at random. A basket, an artificial plant. Sometimes something expensive, like one of the lamp bases. So I can hardly complain. That’s presumably their logic. At least I’m making some money out of them.’
‘I wonder what he does with the stuff.’
‘It generally reappears in the shop. At first I thought I had a stocktaking issue. Then I realised it was the things he was buying that seemed to be multiplying.’
‘Do you give him his money back?’
‘What?’
‘For the things he returns?’
‘Why should I? It’s not like he doesn’t have money to burn.’
Helen breathed. ‘Is Anna his girlfriend?’
‘Depends on the day of the week, from what I can make out.’
She stood. ‘Thank you, for the water and the biscuit. I’ll get out of your hair. I’m sorry that you’ve had all the Rob business raked up again, because of me.’
Lorna sat back and folded her arms. ‘You’re sorry.’
Pounding footsteps up the stairs again, and Karen’s head round the door: ‘Can I go now? It’s five o’clock.’
‘Yes Karen, and don’t take that tone with me. Five o’clock is your finishing time, and it is now five o’clock, so you can go.’
A lift of the lip, and a look flicked at Helen. ‘Damian says we’re giving you a lift? So we’re going now?’
She didn’t thank Lorna again, or say anything else at all. She just picked up her bag and made her way down the stairs. Lorna didn’t come after her.
Karen was standing outside the door of the shop, saying, ‘Oh come on. She can do that,’ hands on hips, huge bag slung from one shoulder. Anna was pushing the pram with the teddy and mini blackboard and jack-in-the-box in through the door, and behind her Damian was carrying the sandwich board that said ‘Damask and Delft: Interiors, Antiques, Gifts’.