A Banquet of Consequences

by Elizabeth George

  But all that ended when Charlie’s brother Will had died in Dorset. A single hysterical phone call from Caroline became the first blow upon what India had slowly come to realise was the far too delicate structure of the relationship she had built with her husband. The how of Will’s death, the why of it, the where of it . . . ? These had been mere details to accompany the devastating fact of it: running madly up the hillside to the top of the lesser of two cliffs in a place called Seatown, where the greater cliff was 650 feet above a stony beach and the lesser cliff dropped a jumper 500 feet to certain death below. Only one person knew for certain what had actually occurred to fire Will’s act that terrible day, while everyone else believed what they chose to believe, which was what they could bear to believe or could not bear or did not wish to face bearing, ever.

  Charlie was in the last group, and India found this difficult to take in and more impossible to live with as the months wore on. The man was a psychotherapist, she told herself. He knew better than to avoid either his feelings or the truth. But avoid them he did, never mentioning his brother’s name, exhibiting a false sense of heartiness—hale fellow well met and all the trimmings—that she was supposed to take as real, offering ill-timed jokes that were not the least amusing, shooting out inappropriate remarks so totally unlike him that she began to wonder if she knew him at all. All of this was meant to carry him through days that were torture for him while every moment declared a terrible truth that he could neither look at nor live with: He had not been able to help his brother.

  Will’s death had not been a horrible accident in which someone had wandered too close to a cliff edge that comprised sands and clay and was thus frighteningly unstable. There had been no terrible incident of someone backing up to pose for a photo with the sea behind him, no drug-induced flight from the tent where Will had been camping with Lily Foster. There had been instead a deliberate storming up the slope to the cliff’s top in broad daylight, with Will’s erstwhile lover chasing after him.

  Lily Foster had seen it all, bearing witness to the excruciating spectacle of a young man’s throwing himself to his death. At the base of the cliff, Will’s head had splattered on a boulder while part of the fragile landscape above him descended on his body in a mock burial.

  How do you regain yourself when your only brother takes his own life? There was a way, of course. What India believed was that there had to be a way. But Charlie Goldacre had obdurately refused to seek it. India Elliott—as she was now again and as she ever would be—bore with this refusal and its burdens on her marriage as long as she could, which turned out to be only as long as twenty-nine months after William’s death. At that point she came to understand that, difficult as it was to face, there were times when the only life you could save was your own.

  Part of that saving had been leaving Charlie. Part of it, she felt, was accepting the second date with Nathaniel Thompson. He preferred to be called Nat. She preferred Nathaniel as she found it a lovely name, but she went along with his desire and said, “All right then, Nat,” and when after seven bus rides from St. Dunstan’s Hill to Camberwell, he’d asked her if she wouldn’t like to have a glass of wine near Camberwell Green, she said she would like that very much, thank you, although the walk from Camberwell Green to her house would be a long one if she disembarked there.

  The glass of wine had become dinner had become coffee. The hour was late at the end of this, so Nat phoned for a minicab and he rode along with her and then on to his own place after a chaste kiss on the cheek and a “see you tomorrow, then?” in reference to their regular bus ride together.

  India found that the prospect of a real, planned date with Nat Thompson had an appeal to it that she hadn’t expected, so when on the next day’s bus ride, he told her of a show at Tate Britain that he was thinking of looking at and was she interested if he managed two tickets, she said yes, she was. She went back to calling herself India Elliott after that, something that Charlie discovered when he phoned the clinic. He’d been upset—“Come along, India. What man wouldn’t be?”—but she’d held firm.

  That was before his mother showed up. Cleverly, Caroline had made an appointment at the clinic. More clever still, she’d made it under the surname MacKerron, which India glanced at but didn’t twig to as she took the folder from the holder mounted on the treatment room’s door, opening the first in prelude to opening the second. C. K. MacKerron was the patient’s name. New, she saw. Married, she saw. Female, she saw. Forty-nine years old and a martyr to unspecified hip pain.

  She said, “Mrs. MacKerron,” as she entered, and then she stopped on the threshold with the doorknob still in her hand.

  Caroline’s first words were, “Please don’t be angry, India. I thought you might not see me if I used Goldacre. I’ve had to come to London for an event with Clare, so I decided . . . Well, you see.” She was sitting on a straight-backed chair in the corner of the treatment room. The light was dim, as it would be in a clinic built from what remained of the ruin that had been Sir Christopher Wren’s rebuilding of an ancient Saxon church. Destroyed in the Blitz, what had been the church was a garden now defined by concentric circles, a fountain to dull the roar of traffic from Lower Thames Street, lush plantings, and ancient walls reaching upward, unroofed, to the sky. Only Wren’s original tower remained and in this was the clinic. Small rooms and few windows defined the space.

  India didn’t know what to say, so she went with, “I’m not at all angry,” which was the truth. She wasn’t sure what she did feel at this unexpected sight of her mother-in-law, aside from surprise at the amount of weight Caroline was continuing to gain, but the heartbeat that tapped lightly behind her eardrums told her it was something and she would do herself a service to know.

  She set the patient folder on a counter. She herself sat on the physician’s stool. The treatment table stood between them.

  Caroline said, “You’ve done yourself up. Your hair, the new cut of it and the colour, the makeup as well . . . I don’t quite know what to say about it. It’s unexpected. You were always so natural.”

  “Indeed. I was.” India didn’t add what she could have. That her natural look had been manufactured, at Charlie’s insistence and to please his mother. Caroline Goldacre didn’t like to see young women who—as she put it—felt the need to alter their “native” looks. What Charlie had never been able to explain was why his mother felt like that when she herself was so thoroughly dyed and painted. But she’d cooperated with Charlie—had India—even to the extreme of going au naturel on her wedding day. What on earth had she been thinking? India asked herself now.

  Caroline opened her handbag, and for a moment India thought she was going to bring forth a gift, which she was going to have to refuse. But it was a packet of tissues, and Caroline opened it and took one, as if knowing it was going to be needed in the next few minutes. She said, “She told me you’re India Elliott now. Over the phone when I made the appointment and said Goldacre, they said it’s Elliott now. What am I to take it that means? He’s devastated already. This will probably kill him. No, don’t say anything. Just listen for a moment, and I’ll be gone.”

  India knew where this meeting would head. She already felt wretched about leaving Charlie, as if she’d stamped on someone who was already lying wounded in the street. But she’d also done everything she knew to do in order to help him recover from his brother’s death, and they’d reached a point where Charlie himself had to do something, which he would not.

  Caroline seemed to read this response on India’s face because she said, “There’s no timeline on grief. You can’t say that someone must get over a death—not a death like Will’s—the way you’d recover from the death of a friend or even a spouse. This was his brother.” Her chin began to dimple at that word brother, and India knew how difficult it was for Caroline to speak of the suicide of her younger son. But she forged on although tears began to make crooked pathways down her cheeks. “There�
�s not going to be another brother for him. He can’t pick up the pieces and just soldier on. You have no siblings, so you probably can’t understand how close they were, how Charlie stood in place of Will’s father when he had no actual interested father and Charlie himself only ten years old and a thousand times he was there for Will when Will needed someone to be his mate, his protector, his . . . his everything when their own father wouldn’t . . . India, I didn’t mean to coddle either one of the boys, Will or Charlie, but when a child is troubled, then a parent has to do something or face the worst. And now it’s happened. And so to have him gone now, his only brother ripped out of his life, and on top of it, to lose you. You can’t do this. You must see where it could lead and how afraid I am that—”

  India went to her mother-in-law, who held her hands up in a pleading gesture. She quite understood Caroline’s deep fear: that Charlie would also kill himself. She feared this as well. Her fear was what had kept her in place for more than two years till something had to happen to force Charlie to take action, and removing herself as his crutch and emotional whipping boy had been the only route she could take.

  “He needs to get help, Mum,” India said. “He knows that, but he won’t do it. He says I’m his help—”

  “You are.”

  “—but you and I know that isn’t the truth. He’s lost most of his clients. He’s stopped leaving the flat. There’re days when he doesn’t even dress. He just lies on the sofa and stares at the ceiling. And when I ask him or try to talk to him or—”

  “I know, I know.” Caroline wept, abject in her grief. “You’ve a right to a life that’s not like this one. But can you not see . . . ?” She had shredded her tissue, so she got another and pressed it to her wet cheeks. This action seemed to calm her because when she next spoke, her voice was altered, no longer pleading but reasoned and gentle as well. “Can you at least not file for divorce, India?”

  “I have no plans to do that.”

  “Oh thank God. Because, you see, he’s in pieces now that you’ve begun to date, and to go from that to receiving papers telling him you’re . . .”

  But India didn’t attend to the rest because, in that moment, she understood. She’d told not a soul she was dating. She’d not yet said a word even to her own mother. So if Caroline Goldacre knew that she was seeing someone, there was only one way she could have found out.

  Charlie had told her. He’d rung her and told her and, as she’d done for years, Caroline had rushed in to do the work meant for one of her boys.

  But that wasn’t the worst of it, actually. For India also had never told Charlie that she was seeing someone. So if he knew, he’d been following her.

  SPITALFIELDS

  LONDON

  The only real clues that Charlie Goldacre had that he hadn’t been out of the flat in two weeks were the rubbish bags and the fridge. The first were beginning to stack up in the entry like spine-slumped debutantes hoping in vain for a dance partner. The second was bare of everything but condiments, some mouldy cheese, three eggs, and a carton of milk whose odour suggested the way of wisdom would have been to pour its contents straight down the drain. Other than that, there was—at least to his eyes—nothing to suggest he’d been holed up inside what had once been his home with his wife since seeing her out with another man.

  Prior to that, he’d had good days and bad days. While it was true that most of them had been bad, there had been mornings when he’d managed to muster enough energy to shove from his chest the hundredweight that seemed to flatten him to the mattress. On those days, he did go out. And while he found himself largely incapable of meeting with clients, he was able to walk the streets, to stare at his surroundings, and to try to make sense of stories he read in discarded broadsheets and tabloids on the occasions that he stopped for a coffee. But what he read, he quickly forgot, just as he also forgot where he had been and what he had seen.

  Life continued around him. Traffic roared into the City in the morning and out of the City in the afternoon. Pavements were crowded with office workers, shop assistants, and skulking young men in black hoodies and jeans. The markets in Middlesex Street and Goulston Street continued to thrive. All of this seemed so curious to Charlie. His own life had ground to a halt, so it was difficult to take in the reality that for everyone else, the struggle went on.

  That’s what it was, he’d decided. An eternal struggle to come to terms with realities that shifted from day to day. One day you were going about your business, secure in the illusion that you had arrived at the exact point for which you’d been aiming. The next day, you found yourself on a runaway train about to derail. He had known this was possible, of course, considering the years of study that had gone into his making as a psychotherapist. But the level at which he knew it was the level at which he applied it to other people and not to himself. Yet he should have understood all along how fragile was the ice on which he had established his life because every human being’s life was a fragile thing. He should also have been prepared that at any moment his world would tilt on its axis in such a way that only by clinging desperately to a few familiar items within it would he keep himself from sliding off his personal planet and into oblivion.

  After Will’s death, he’d clung to India. Then, when she’d left him, he’d clung to his remaining clients. When those tortured souls had finally moved on to find someone who actually listened to their weekly tales of woe instead of observing them blankly, he’d begun to cling to his home.

  Art Deco, India had called it. Charlie, Charlie, we must have it! The smallest flat they’d seen, it was perfect crown mouldings and stunning bookshelves. It was pristine railings and hardwood floors and glossy tiles. It was Egyptian revival and razzle-dazzle, and they should have walked out of the place the moment after they had walked in. But she’d been desperate for it, and he’d wanted to please her after the extremes she’d gone to just to please him. To please his mother, actually. For it had seemed so crucial at the time that Caroline Goldacre approve of India.

  What anyone else thought of Charlie’s choice of mate didn’t matter to him. But Caroline’s approval had been paramount. India had questioned this, but not enough. Why had she been so docile? he wondered. Why hadn’t she tried to fight him?

  But he more or less knew the answer to this. One always ended up living to please his mother. One didn’t even see the change in oneself as pleasing her became a way of life.

  He was thinking of this when he heard a key unlock the door to the flat. He was in the kitchen, where on the wall he had mounted a small whiteboard on which he kept a record of his daily activities. Prior to Will’s death there had been need for this, for Charlie was an inveterate volunteer on mornings or afternoons or evenings when he had no clients. He walked dogs from the Battersea home, he worked a suicide hotline—wasn’t that a bloody good joke, he thought—he read to pensioners with failing vision in care homes, he helped a group of disadvantaged kids maintain an allotment south of the river. But these pursuits had become too overwhelming. One at a time, he’d given them up and when the flat door opened and he heard his mother’s voice calling out a quiet hello, he was in the process of erasing the last of them from the whiteboard.

  He heard Caroline’s footsteps as she entered the sitting room. She would see that he’d been sleeping on the sofa and had he known she was coming, he would have hidden this evidence. She wouldn’t understand why he couldn’t bring himself to use the bed he’d shared with India. Indeed, until India had removed the last of her belongings from the flat, he could hardly bare to touch a single surface, so fraught with memories was everything for him.

  He heard his mother sigh, and then she went towards the bedroom, calling his name. He didn’t answer as the flat was so small it would be a matter of five seconds before she found him. He was applying the thick felt rubber to the word Samaritans when she spoke behind him. “Why didn’t you answer me, Charlie? Turn round and let me look
at you, please.”

  She drew in a slow breath when he did as she asked. She shook her head as if to say, “Do not utter a word,” and she left him. But she was back soon enough and in her hand a mirror that she’d brought from the bathroom. She held it up before him and said, “Do it, please,” and he gazed upon what he didn’t wish to see.

  He was hollow-faced, unshaven. His eyes—blue like his father’s and his maternal grandfather’s—were grimy with sleep and half ringed with purple. His hair was uncombed. And the rest of him that the mirror didn’t show was, he knew, not much better. For he couldn’t recall the last time he had changed his clothes or even had a shower, and his shoulders slumped habitually now while his chest caved inward as it had done for years in order to disguise his height to spare the feelings of his younger brother.

  His gaze went from his reflection to his mother’s face. He saw love in her expression, and he tried to reflect that back to her as he turned the mirror in her hand so that she could look on her own image. He said, “What do they say? ‘Physician heal—’” but she cut him off.

  “Don’t,” she said. “This has nothing to do with Will, and you know it.” This referred to the enormous amount of weight she’d gained since his brother’s death, rendering her moonfaced now, a once-slender woman taken to disguising her bulk with flowing garments and copious amounts of ethnic jewellery. She wore today a piece that he recognised as having once belonged to India. Caroline had taken it from the back of the bathroom door one evening. India had seen it on her later—so had he in fact—but neither one of them had said a word. God, he thought now. What was wrong with them when it came to his mum?