Playing for the Ashes

by Elizabeth George

  Mother’s face crumpled. Tremors shook her hand. “I didn’t know,” she said against the worn leather ball. “I didn’t know.”

  She walked past me as if I wasn’t there. She went down the corridor and into the morning room. I followed slowly and found her at the window, tapping her forehead against the glass. With each tap, she increased the force. She said only, “Ken,” with every tap.

  I felt immobilised by fear, dread, and my own disability. What to do, I wondered. Who to talk to. How to help. I couldn’t even go below to the kitchen and engage in the simple task of fixing her a meal which she no doubt needed because I couldn’t bring it up to her once I’d cooked it and even if I could have done, I was terrified to leave her alone.

  The telephone began to ring again. As it did so, she increased the strength with which she was hitting her head against the glass. I felt my legs start to cramp. I felt my arms weaken. I needed to sit. I wanted to run.

  I went to the phone, lifted the receiver, then replaced it. Before it had a chance to begin ringing again, I punched in the number of the barge and prayed that Chris had gone directly back once he’d dropped me off. Mother continued to bang her head against the window. The panes of glass rattled. As the phone rang on the other end of the line, the first pane cracked. I said, “Mother!” as she increased both the force and the rhythm of her pounding.

  When I heard Chris answer, I said, “Come back. Hurry,” and I hung up the phone before he could respond. The pane of glass broke. Its pieces shattered on the windowsill and then on the floor. I went to Mother. She’d cut her forehead, but she didn’t seem to notice the blood that ran in a trickle into the corner of her eye and then down her cheek like a martyr’s tears. I took her arm. I tugged on it gently. I said, “Mother. It’s Olivia. I’m here. Sit down.”

  She said only, “Ken.”

  “You can’t do this to yourself. For God’s sake. Please.”

  A second pane broke. Glass tinkled to the floor. I could see the new cuts begin to ooze blood.

  I jerked her back towards me. “Stop it!”

  She pulled away. She went back to the window. She continued to pound.

  “Goddamn you!” I shrieked. “Stop it! Now!”

  I struggled to get closer to her. I reached around her. I grabbed her hands. I found the cricket ball, snatched it from her, and threw it to the floor. It rolled into a corner beneath an urn stand. Her head turned then. She followed the ball with her eyes. She lifted a wrist to her forehead and brought it away smeared with blood. Then she began to weep.

  “I didn’t know you were there. Help me. Dearest. I didn’t know you were there.”

  I guided her to the chesterfield as best I could. She shrank into a corner with her head against the arm and her blood dripping onto the ancient lace antimacassar. I watched her helplessly. The blood. The tears. I shuffled into the dining room where I found the decanter of sherry. I poured myself one and threw it down my throat. I did the same to another. The third I clutched in my fist and, eyes on it to keep from spilling, I returned to her.

  I said, “Drink this. Mother, listen to me. Drink this. You’ve got to take it because my hands don’t work well enough to hold it for you. D’you hear me, Mother? It’s sherry. You need to drink it.”

  She’d stopped speaking. She seemed to be staring at the silver buckle on my belt. One of her hands plucked at the antimacassar beneath her head. The other gripped the tie of her dressing gown. I inched my hand forward and held the sherry out to her.

  “Please,” I said. “Mother,” I said. “Take it.”

  She blinked. I set the sherry onto the games table next to her. I blotted her forehead with the antimacassar. The cuts weren’t deep. Only one of them continued to bleed. I pressed the lace to it as the doorbell rang.

  Chris took over with his usual competence. He took one look at her, rubbed her hands between his own, and held the sherry to her mouth until she’d drunk it down.

  “She needs a doctor,” he said.

  “No!” I couldn’t imagine what she’d say, what a doctor would conclude, what would happen next. I modulated my voice. “We can deal with it. She’s had a shock. We need to get her to eat. We need to get her to bed.”

  Mother stirred. She lifted her hand and examined the wrist that was smeared with blood, dried now to the colour of wet rust. “Oh,” she said. “Cut,” she said. She put the wrist to her mouth. She cleaned herself with her tongue.

  “Can you get her something to eat?” I asked Chris.

  “I didn’t know you were there,” Mother whispered.

  Chris looked her way. He started to respond.

  I said, “Breakfast,” in a hurry. “Cereal. Tea. Anything. Chris, please. She needs food.”

  “I didn’t know,” Mother said.

  “What’s she—”

  “Chris! For God’s sake. I can’t get down to the kitchen.”

  He nodded and left us.

  I sat next to her. I kept one hand gripped on to the walker just to feel something solid and unchangeable beneath my fingers. I said in a low voice, “You were in Kent on Wednesday night?”

  “I didn’t know you were there. Ken, I didn’t know.” Tears slid from the corners of her eyes.

  “Did you set a fire?”

  She brought her fist to her mouth.

  “Why?” I whispered. “Why did you do it?”

  “Everything to me. My heart. My mind. Nothing will hurt you. Nothing. No one.” She bit her index finger as she began to sob. Between her teeth, she took the meaty part of the finger from knuckle to first joint. All the while she wept.

  I covered her fist with my hand. I said, “Mother,” and tried to pull it away from her mouth. She was far stronger than I would have imagined.

  The phone began to ring again. It was cut off abruptly, so I supposed Chris had picked it up in the kitchen. He would fend off journalists. We had nothing to fear there. But as I watched my mother, I realised that it wasn’t the phone calls of journalists I feared. I feared the police.

  I tried to calm her by putting my hand on the side of her head, by smoothing down her hair. I said, “We’ll think this through. You’ll be all right.”

  Chris returned with a tray that he took into the dining room. I heard the sound of plates and cutlery clicking onto the table. He came into the morning room. He put his arm round Mother’s shoulders, saying, “Mrs. Whitelaw, I’ve made you some scrambled eggs,” and he helped her to her feet.

  She clung to his arm. One of her hands climbed his chest to rest on his shoulder. She examined his face so closely it looked as if she was committing it to memory. She said, “What she did to you. The pain she caused you. It was mine when it wasn’t. I couldn’t bear that, darling. You weren’t meant to suffer any longer at her hands. Do you see?”

  I could tell Chris was glancing my way, but I kept my face averted by concentrating on rising from the chesterfield and positioning myself within the three-sided protection of the walker. We went into the dining room. We sat ourselves on either side of Mother. Chris picked up a fork and put it in her hand. I drew the plate closer to her.

  She whimpered. “I can’t.”

  Chris said, “Have some, won’t you? You’ll need your strength.”

  She let the fork clatter to the plate. “You told me you were going to Greece. Let me do this for you, darling Ken. I thought. Let me solve this problem.”

  “Mother,” I said quickly. “You need to have something to eat. You’ll be talking to people, won’t you? Journalists. The police. The insurance…” I dropped my eyes. The cottage. Insurance. What had she done? Why? God, what a horror. “Don’t talk any more while the food’s getting cold. Eat first, Mother.”

  Chris scooped up some eggs and returned the fork to her hand. She began to eat. Her movements were sluggish. Each one of them seemed thought out at great length before it was made.

  When she had eaten, we took her back into the morning room. I told Chris where to find blankets and pillows, and we mad
e a bed for her on the chesterfield. The phone began ringing as we worked. Chris picked it up, listened, said, “Unavailable, I’m afraid,” and left it off the hook. I found the cricket ball where I had thrown it, and when Mother lay on the chesterfield and let Chris cover her, I handed her the ball. She clutched it just beneath her chin. She started to speak, but I said, “You rest. I’ll sit right here.” Her eyes closed. I wondered when it was that she’d last slept.

  Chris left. I stayed. I sat on the velvet settee. I watched my mother. I counted the quarter hours as the grandfather clock chimed them. The sun slowly moved the shadows across the room. I tried to think what to do.

  She must have needed the insurance money, I thought. My surmises scattered like birdshot from there: She hadn’t run the printworks as well as she might have done. Things were getting tight. She didn’t want to tell Kenneth because she didn’t want to worry him or to distract him from his career. Things were getting tight for him. He was supporting his family. The children were getting older. There were more demands placed upon him financially. He was in debt. He had creditors hounding him. They decided to throw convention to the wind and to marry but Jean was demanding a single time payment of so much cash before she’d allow a divorce. The oldest son wanted to go to Winchester. Kenneth couldn’t afford it at the same time as he paid Jean off. Mother wanted to help so that they could be married. She had cancer. One of the children had cancer. He had cancer. The money was needed for a special cure. Blackmail. Someone knew something and was making her pay….

  I leaned my head against the back of the settee. I couldn’t think what to do because I couldn’t understand what had been done. The sleeplessness of the previous nights began to take its toll on me. I couldn’t make a decision about anything. I couldn’t plan. I couldn’t think. I slept.

  When I awoke, the light had faded. I lifted my head and winced with the pain of the position I’d been in. I looked at the chesterfield. Mother was gone. My mind leapt into action. Where was she? Why? What had she done? Could she possibly be…

  “You’ve had a good sleep, darling.” I swung my head to the doorway.

  She’d bathed. She’d dressed in a long black tunic and matching trousers. She’d put on lipstick. She’d seen to her hair. She wore a plaster on her forehead where she’d cut herself.

  “Are you hungry?” she asked. I shook my head. She came into the room. She went to the chesterfield and folded the blankets we’d used to cover her. She smoothed them down neatly and stacked them. She folded the stained antimacassar into a square. This she placed in the centre of the stacked blankets. Then she sat exactly where she had sat in the early hours of Thursday morning, in the corner of the chesterfield that was nearest my place on the settee.

  Her gaze didn’t falter as she looked at me. She said, “I am in your hands, Olivia,” and I saw that the power had come to me fully at last.

  How odd it felt. There was no triumph in the knowledge, only dread, fear, and responsibility. I wanted none of those sensations, least of all the last.

  “Why?” I asked her. “Tell me that much. I need to understand.”

  Her eyes flickered off mine for an instant, moving to the Flemish painting on the wall above me. Then they returned to my face. “How ironic I find it,” she said.

  “What?”

  “To think that, after all the anguish you and I have caused each other through the years, at the end of both our lives it’s come down to need.” She gazed at me steadily. Her expression didn’t change. She looked perfectly calm, not resigned but ready.

  “It’s come down to someone being dead,” I said. “And if there’s need involved, it’s going to come from the police. They need answers. What’re you going to tell them?”

  “We’ve come to need each other,” she said. “You and I, Olivia. That’s where it stands. Here. At the end of things.”

  I was held by her gaze like a mouse gets held by the gaze of a snake just before he becomes the snake’s dinner. I forced my eyes to the fireplace, to the massive ebony chimneypiece whose centre clock had been stopped forever the night Queen Victoria died. It had been my great-grandfather’s symbolic act of mourning the end of an era. For me, it had long served as a demonstration of the hold the past maintains upon us.

  Mother spoke again. Her voice was quiet. “Had you not been here when I got home, had I not been made aware of your…” She faltered, apparently looking for a euphemism. “Had I not seen your condition—what this disease is doing to you and going to do to you—I would have taken my life. I would have done it on Friday evening without the slightest hesitation when I was told that Ken was dead in the cottage. I had the razors here. I filled the bathtub to make the bleeding easier. I sat in the water and held the razor to my wrist. But I couldn’t cut. Because to leave you now, to force you to face this horrible death without me here to help even in the smallest way…” She shook her head. “How the gods must be laughing at both of us, Olivia. For years I wanted my daughter to come home.”

  “And I came,” I said.

  “You did.”

  I ran my hand back and forth on the old velvet upholstery, feeling the rise and fall of its worn nap. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Timing,” I said. “God, what a mess I’ve made of things.” She didn’t respond. She appeared to be waiting for something more. She sat perfectly still in the dying light of the afternoon, and she watched me as I formulated the question and gathered the resources to ask it again. “Why? Mother, why did you do it? Have you…. Do you need money or something? Were you thinking of the insurance on the cottage?”

  Her right hand sought the wedding ring on her left. Her fingers closed on it. “No,” she said.

  “Then what?”

  She rose. She walked to the bay window where she replaced the telephone receiver into its cradle. She stood there for a moment with her head bent, with the tips of her fingers resting on the table-top. She said, “I must sweep up this broken glass.”

  I said, “Mother. Tell me the truth.”

  “The truth?” She raised her head. She didn’t turn back to me. “Love, Olivia. That’s always the beginning of things, isn’t it? What I didn’t understand is that it’s also the end.”

  OLIVIA

  I’ve learned two lessons. First, there is the truth. Second, neither admitting nor acknowledging truth makes you free.

  I’ve also learned that no matter what I do, someone is going to suffer at my hands.

  At first, I thought I could bury knowledge. All the loose ends surrounding that Wednesday night-Thursday morning affair didn’t exactly tie up, and Mother wouldn’t clarify what she meant about love other than to say she’d done it for him, and I didn’t know—and I didn’t want to know—who the she was that Mother had been referring to in conjunction with Kenneth. All I knew for certain was that it was an accident that Kenneth Fleming had died in the cottage that night. It was an accident. And Mother’s punishment, if punishment was required, would be having to live with the knowledge that she had started the fire that killed the man she loved. Wouldn’t that be punishment enough? Yes, it would, I concluded. It would.

  I decided to keep what I knew to myself. I wouldn’t tell Chris. What would be the point?

  But then, the investigation heightened. I followed what I could of it in the newspapers and on the radio news. A deliberate fire had been started by an incendiary device the nature of which the police wouldn’t reveal. But it was the nature of the device, apparently, and not solely its presence that encouraged the authorities to begin using the words arson and murder. Once those words were employed, their companions began making appearances in the media: suspect, killer, victim, motive. Interest grew. Speculation flourished. Then Jimmy Cooper confessed.

  I waited for Mother to phone me. She’s a woman of conscience, I told myself. She’ll come forward now. Any minute. Any hour. Because this is Kenneth Fleming’s son we’re talking about. This is Kenneth’s son.

  I tried to label the turn of events convenient for all of us
. He’s only a boy, I thought. If he stands trial and is found guilty, what can the criminal justice system do with a sixteen-year-old convicted killer? Wouldn’t they just send him to a place like Borstal for a few years’ useful rehabilitation? And couldn’t that be seen as a social advantage? He’d be cared for there, he’d be educated, he’d be given employment skills that he no doubt needed desperately. He’d probably end up all the better for having had the experience.

  Then I saw his photograph, when he was taken from his comprehensive by the police. He was walking between two constables, trying his best to look like he didn’t give a fig for what was happening to him. He was trying to seem like he couldn’t be touched. He was playing it tough and taking himself to a place where his answer to every question would be a sneer. Oh, I know that look Jimmy had on his face. It said, “I’ve got armour,” and “I don’t care about nothing.” It communicated the fact that the past didn’t matter because he had no future.

  I phoned Mother then. I asked her did she know about Jimmy. She said the police were merely talking to him. I asked what was she going to do. She said that she was in my hands.

  “Olivia,” she said, “I’ll understand your decision, whatever it is.”

  “What’ll they do to him? Mother, what’ll they do?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve already arranged for a solicitor. He’s been talking to the boy.”

  “Does the solicitor know? What really…I mean…”

  “I can’t think they’ll put him on trial, Olivia. He may have been in the vicinity that night, but he wasn’t in the cottage. They’ve no proof of that.”

  “What happened?” I asked her. “That night. Mother, at least tell me what happened.”