by J. S. Monroe
I don’t think he was a spy – he used to make disparaging remarks about the ‘spooks’ at the High Commission in Islamabad – but I guess I just thought his work was important and if he didn’t want to tell me more about it, there was probably a good reason. All I know is that his job took us to some incredible places over the years: India, Pakistan, China, Hong Kong.
‘He did a lot of good work with young people,’ Dr Lance said, looking at Simon for agreement. Or was it for his approval? ‘Saved a lot of lives.’
‘Really?’ I said, surprised. Dad had never mentioned working with young people, though he once said he wished he’d been a teacher.
‘Extraordinary work. His death has left a big hole in a lot of lives,’ Simon said.
I looked away at the fireplace, my eyes brimming. It’s just over two months since Dad died and I’d be in denial if I said I was even beginning to come to terms with him not being around, not being available at the end of a phone. He would always take calls from me, even in important meetings. I think it was a promise he’d made to himself.
‘I’d be honoured to accept the award on Dad’s behalf,’ I eventually managed to say. ‘Thank you.’
‘Excellent. There’s one other thing, though,’ Simon continued. ‘It’s been brought to our attention that some journalists have been asking about your father, the exact circumstances of his death. I’d be grateful if you could let me know if anyone tries contacting you directly.’
‘What are they asking?’
‘The usual Fleet Street stuff, whether he was a spy. We’re not commenting and nor should you.’
I’ve still got the card of a journalist who approached me at Dad’s funeral. I should have thrown it out. I’m not sure why I’ve kept it, or why I didn’t mention it then. Perhaps it’s because there’s a grain of doubt in my mind too about Dad’s death, not that it was suspicious or anything like that, but that I don’t know the full story of his life.
I don’t have the mental strength right now to ask questions. All I know is that the Foreign Office launched its own internal inquiry, which concluded that Dad died in an accident: a car crash in the Himalayas, outside Leh, in Ladakh – one of my favourite places in the world, despite its treacherous roads. He was trying to establish the nature of the Chinese threat along India’s border with Tibet. At least, that’s what he told me in so many words when he rang from Heathrow. ‘Send my love to the Dalai Lama,’ I’d joked. I think they were the last words I ever said to him.
‘He wasn’t a spy, was he?’ I asked, as Simon turned to Dr Lance, signalling that our meeting was over. I didn’t expect him to answer.
‘No,’ he said. ‘He was much more important than that.’
23
‘It’s just a coincidence, Jar,’ Carl says, sipping on a fresh pint.
‘You say that,’ Jar replies, more drunk than he should be on a Tuesday night. ‘But how many female bereavement counsellors do you know who are a) American b) drop-dead-gorgeous blondes and c) take small but weirdly audible breaths just before they speak? Answer me that.’
‘So Kirsten’s a spice now, is she? You’ve changed your tune.’
‘I wouldn’t kick her out of bed for eating crisps. You know that. I know that. It’s just a statement of fact. “Beauty is truth, truth beauty – that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”’
Jar only allows himself to quote poets, particularly British ones, when he’s drunk. ‘You don’t believe me, do you?’ he continues. ‘Don’t you think it’s weird now?’
‘No. I don’t, Jar. I don’t think it’s weird at all. It’s pure chance. Serendipity.’
Jar’s too drunk to make his case again, or mock Carl for attempting a word like ‘serendipity’, but he tries.
‘I know you mean well, Carl, but there’s a great deal of sense outside your head,’ he says. ‘I was arrested by the police this morning the moment I walked out of Kirsten’s door on Harley Street. Literally, it was a few yards down the road from her gaff. She picked up the phone and called them as soon as I left.’
‘Why would she do that?’
‘Because I lied about the diary. She asked me if Rosa kept a journal and I said she didn’t. It was the last question of the session, what the whole hour had been leading up to.’
Carl gives him a look. Jar knows how he must sound – paranoid, deluded – but he no longer cares.
‘Why did you say she didn’t?’ Carl asks.
Jar glances at his friend as he takes another sip from his pint of Gat. For a second, the thought crosses his mind that Carl’s in on this too. It’s happened before – fleeting, irrational suspicions, threatening to poison the well of their friendship – but he has learnt to dismiss them as quickly as they arrive.
This time, it’s harder. Carl was the one who introduced him to Kirsten, told him to let her help him. He and Carl go back a long way, he reassures himself: five years. They met soon after he moved to London. Not long after Rosa died…
‘Will you answer me this,’ Jar says, trying to move on. ‘She used a certain turn of phrase. Said that most people think a post-bereavement hallucination is like a “contrail left in the sky”. Rosa wrote something almost identical in her diary: “No contrails left in the Fenland sky.” Said it was the sort of thing her counsellor would say.’
‘And?’ Carl raises his eyebrows.
‘Don’t you think that’s strange? A curious expression for both of them to use?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘I googled it: there are only seven hundred occurrences of that phrase across the entire internet.’
‘I’ve got to be honest, bro. This is not just some weird little OCD coincidence fantasy you’ve got going on here, it’s a serious problem. You were lifted by the Feds.’
‘Tell me about it. And then there was the hacking of my email account…’
‘I could have been arrested too,’ he says, ignoring Jar’s earlier computer problems. ‘And Anton.’
‘There aren’t any dodgy images on that hard drive.’
‘You say that. But how do we know?’
‘Because this whole thing about indecent images is just a cover. They’re after Rosa’s diary, Carl.’
There is a pause while both men nurse their pints, watching the barman mix Bacardi and Red Bulls for two young Asian students. Neither of them would normally frequent a pub on Piccadilly – tourist territory – but they both needed a drink after Carl, panting like a dog, had handed over the hard drive to Jar at 8.55 p.m. outside Savile Row police station. He had waited on the street, getting his breath back, while Jar went inside and gave the drive to the duty officer, who seemed to be expecting it. Miles Cato was nowhere to be seen.
They had met his deadline, but only just. Anton had kicked off about copying the disk, asking why Carl suddenly wanted it back. He protested even more when Carl asked him to add another layer of encryption on to the original folder. Jar hoped that would delay Miles Cato – buy him a few days, even a few hours – but he doubted it.
‘Thanks for picking up the hard drive,’ Jar says, by way of a peace offering.
‘Anton wasn’t happy.’
‘He did encode it, though?’
‘He disappeared for an hour.’
‘How much do I owe you?’
‘A lifetime’s supply of bubble hash.’
‘Is that what you promised him?’
‘If it don’t bubble, it ain’t worth the trouble,’ Carl says, glancing at his watch as he puts a drunken arm around Jar. ‘She should be here any minute.’
‘Who should?’ Jar looks around the crowded pub, but he doesn’t recognise anyone.
‘Drop-dead-gorgeous Kirsten, of course.’
‘Carl?’ He can’t believe what his friend has just said.
‘Relax. She’s off duty. Promised not to talk about this morning.’
‘But—’
‘I won’t say a word about her Cambridge doppelgänger. Or contrails. Or weird breathing. I pro
mise. Chill.’
Again Jar declines to bump his friend’s outstretched fist. Instead, he searches his familiar eyes for evidence of betrayal. What the hell’s Carl doing asking Kirsten to join them? And why has he just confided so much in him?
‘I’m not comfortable with this. I’m her client. At least I was. I’m not sure I ever want to go back there.’
‘Even more reason to enjoy her company this evening.’
‘You could have warned me.’
‘I thought I just did.’
‘As she’s about to arrive.’
‘You’d have run off any earlier. She likes you. And she’s hot.’
‘She’s all yours.’
‘I’m a kept man.’
‘Since when?’
‘Since last night. If you’d bothered to come into the office this morning instead of getting yourself arrested, I would have told you all about Tatiana from Odessa.’
‘I’m going to head on.’ Jar is overwhelmed by a sudden need to leave the pub, be on his own, clear his head.
‘Jar…’ Carl’s hand is on his arm now, restraining him. ‘Stay for a bit. It’ll be good for you. Have some fun. Enjoy the craic.’
‘You don’t understand,’ Jar says, ignoring Carl’s crude appeal to his Irishness. He’s not falling for that. ‘I lied to her today, couldn’t get out of there quick enough.’
‘Well lie again. She won’t ask you anything about this morning.’
‘Did you ring her?’
‘She rang me. About the article I’m writing on music and shrinks. Then she asked if you were OK.’
‘When?’ Carl’s his best friend, Jar thinks. Relax.
‘Tonight. When I was at Anton’s. I told her a drink would cheer you up, but we agreed it didn’t sound too professional. She promised to avoid all office talk. Besides, you’re not paying her, so it’s not really a proper client–therapist relationship, is it?’
‘Is that what she said?’
‘It’s my impartial reading of the situation.’
‘M’lud. Jaysus, Carl.’
‘Come on, Jar. You’ve got to get over all this. Move on with your life.’
‘Are you two sure I’m not intruding?’
Jar spins round to see Kirsten standing next to him and smiling in a way that makes his stomach lurch. She’s wearing a low-cut cherry-red dress and heels and is radiating warmth and charm – like a siren, Jar thinks.
‘We were just talking about you,’ Carl says, winking at Jar. ‘What can Jar get you to drink?’
24
Cornwall, Summer, 2011
I’m not sure I can write much tonight. I feel numb, weird, fractured, as if I’m living in a parallel world to the life I lived before Dad died. A world identical to my own in every respect except for one.
Dad was buried this morning, alongside my mother, in the graveyard at Paul, high above Mousehole: the only constant place in our itinerant family’s life. My mum grew up in this Cornish village, where I am writing now. Her mother lived here for sixty years, but the locals still considered her a foreigner (or blow-in, as they say).
Mum inherited a fisherman’s net loft and came down with Dad whenever they were back in the UK. They used to walk along the coast path to Lamorna, drive over the moor to St Ives to buy a painting to take back to their drab Foreign Office quarters in Beijing, Islamabad or Delhi. Dad told me once how he’d had to return a picture to a gallery the day after they’d bought it. It was a painting of a beach, three bands of colour, yellow, green and blue, and late that night, when they were admiring its abstract simplicity over a bottle of wine, Dad suddenly thought he could trace the profile of a giant nude with huge breasts reclining in the dunes. It wasn’t intentional, just an ambiguous shape, but once they’d seen it, the picture was ruined. ‘Mum was quite cross, said I had a filthy mind,’ Dad said.
He brought me down here a lot in the months and years after Mum’s death. I remember tending her grave, cutting back the grass with a pair of children’s red plastic scissors, looking at the neat writing on the slate headstone, asking Dad why there was a big gap below Mum’s name. It was only when I was older that he explained that the space was reserved for him. ‘Two-for-one offer at the undertaker’s,’ he joked.
There weren’t any jokes today. Maybe even Dad would have struggled to see the funny side of his death, aged forty-six, in the prime of his life and career, killed in the Himalayas, a place he loved, by a truck driver who had fallen asleep at the wheel. I’m forcing myself to write these words, in the hope that it will make what’s happened more real. Killed in the Himalayas, a place he loved, by a truck driver who had fallen asleep at the wheel. Right now, my brain refuses to process the fact of his death. Dad’s died. Gone. I will never see him again. Never hear his voice. Link my arm in his.
Tomorrow I will visit the place where Dad told me to go in an emergency, if the world ever slipped off its axis. I have never been before, but he once gave me instructions. It worked for him at certain times in his life – he spent several days there after he lost Mum, he said, walking, camping – and I hope it might offer some solace now. I need something.
Amy – so sad today, heavily sedated – said that there’ll be a memorial service in London in a few months, once everyone has got over the shock. There’ll be more jokes then, I hope, stories shared, laughter remembered. Amy also said that I can visit her every weekend at her house in Cromer, if I need to get away from college. She misses Dad terribly but she’s trying to be strong for me. I know the two of them didn’t see as much of each other as they would have liked, because of Martin. She’s promised that won’t happen with me in the future.
I managed to get through my reading in the service: ‘What is Success’, one of Dad’s favourite poems (‘To laugh often and much… to find the best in others… this is to have succeeded’), which he liked to point out was wrongly attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson. I’m not sure what everyone made of the poem. Amy tried to talk me out of reading anything in public, but I felt I owed it to Dad.
I wept before I stood up, when the coffin was first brought in, and I cried afterwards when we sang ‘Dear Lord and Father of Mankind’, but not during my reading. I felt strong then. I imagined Dad at the back of the church, arms folded, nodding encouragingly, like I’d seen him once at the doors of the school theatre, when he turned up from London just in time to watch me sing ‘Oh, Look at Me!’ in Salad Days.
It was a strange collection of people in the stout, weatherbeaten church. There were a lot of his Foreign Office work colleagues, many of whom had travelled down on the train from Paddington to Penzance, although I noticed one or two important-looking people leaving afterwards in discreet government cars.
Dr Lance, who had interviewed me at Cambridge, came up for a chat in the King’s Arms, the pub across the road, where Amy had arranged a wake (crab sandwiches, white wine, wild flowers we’d collected together from the hedgerows that morning). He was very sweet, said how much he looked forward to welcoming me to St Matthew’s in October, although he quite understood if I wanted to postpone my university career. A place would be kept for me.
Fishing boats are returning now, passing across Mount’s Bay on their way home to Newlyn, their navigation lights barely visible in the rain-streaked gloaming. I’m sitting at the same window where Dad used to perch with his binoculars, pointing out ships on the horizon. I wish I had paid more attention. The coal fire is smoking badly – Dad always used to curse its poor ‘draw’ (I never knew how that worked) – and it’s cold in this old, wooden-walled house, but I’m glad I have a few days to myself. It was exhausting today, having to put a brave face on things while I really just wanted to run away across the moor and rail at the gods who have taken Dad away from me.
Some things I’ll never forget about Dad:
• His silly voice as the Once-ler whenever he read me The Lorax.
• Finding him downstairs in his study one night, crying over family photos of Mum, him, and me as a baby,
on holiday in Seville. She had been dead fifteen years.
• The sound of his laughter rising up from the sitting room when he was watching yet another repeat of Dad’s Army.
• Singeing his bushy eyebrows when he set fire to a wet bonfire with petrol.
• Coming to a parents’ evening at school with a bicycle clip still around one trouser leg.
• Standing on the sidelines at a netball match in the rain, cheering me on like it was an international rugby match (I’m sure he wished it was, but he never complained).
A man approached me in the King’s Arms just as we were leaving the wake, said he would like a chat when I’m feeling stronger.
‘I was trying to interview your father for a story I’m working on,’ he said, standing at the bar with a pint in his hand – not his first of the day, I suspected. He was in his early fifties, two stone overweight, and might have been good-looking once, before the beer started to ruddy his face and swell his belly.
‘I’m not sure this is the time or place,’ I said. The only journalists I’ve met are the foreign correspondents who used to turn up at the High Commission in Pakistan for free drinks. They were a fun crowd and I felt similarly unthreatened by the man in front of me. He glanced around the room, which made me look too. ‘Were you at the service?’ I asked.
‘That wouldn’t have been appropriate. I shouldn’t even be here now, talking to you. Will you call me in a month, two months? A year? Whenever you feel you can. I’d appreciate a chat.’
He handed me a card – ‘Max Eadie, freelance journalist’ – and moved off just as one of Dad’s colleagues came over.
‘Everything all right?’ the woman said.
‘Fine,’ I replied, holding the card tightly behind my back.
25
Jar pushes back his chair, running a hand through his hair. He is at his computer in the lock-up, sober after a cold bath, unable to sleep. His evening at the pub in Piccadilly remains a blur. He hopes he behaved, didn’t let on what he now knows to be true: ‘Kirsten’ is the same woman as ‘Karen’, the college counsellor who was introduced to Rosa by Dr Lance five years ago. He’s sure of it. It was Kirsten who approached him through Carl; Kirsten who asked him about Rosa’s diary. And Kirsten who rang the police when he lied. Jar just wishes he knew why she approached him, who she’s working for.