She sat and waited until at last Saffie pulled her head away from her and said, ‘Mum, can we go home now? I want to go home.’
And they stood up and walked, their arms round each other, back towards their house.
*
When Saffie and Jules got in, Jules took Saffie, at her request, straight up to have a bath, gave her two spoonfuls of Calpol and tucked a hot-water bottle under her duvet, as if she were six again. It felt right to treat her as a small child, in need of mothering; she even stayed with her until she was sure she was asleep. Then she sat for a little longer, recalling the anguish on Holly’s face when she had found her there with Saffie on the riverbank, and thinking how in a different life she would have wept with her friend over Saul.
She didn’t know how long she stayed, trying to take in the news that the police had found a body, but she must have been there at least an hour, watching over Saffie as she relaxed, and her cheeks turned pink, and her breathing became regular. She wondered whether she should call Donna Browne, tell her that Saffie was miscarrying and didn’t even realize it. Ask whether there was anything she should do. But she decided that could wait. For the moment, it was clear Saffie needed to sleep more than anything.
Finally, Jules heard the door slam downstairs and knew Rowan had come in. She left Saffie and went down. She was going to tell Rowan that they had found a body. She was going to tell him Saffie had admitted to lying about the rape. And she was going to examine, in minute detail, his reaction.
*
Rowan stared at Jules with a stony expression for some minutes after she’d told him, before he said, ‘I need to get out.’
‘Rowan, please. Don’t run away. We need to talk. I’m upset, for God’s sake. If Saul’s dead, this is a nightmare. I need you here.’
‘I’m going out. I’ll see you later.’
And Rowan had gone into the porch, pulled on his boots and headed out of the door.
He didn’t come back until gone midnight. Jules was in bed by then, lying in the dark, trying to shut out the horrific events of the day. She felt the mattress tilt as he got into bed. She felt his arms go around her. She was facing away from him, and he pulled her towards him. She resisted, instinctively. She didn’t want Rowan to touch her. Not until she knew he was innocent.
In the end, though, she felt his face against her back and realized that the warm, wet feeling soaking through her nightdress onto her skin came from Rowan’s tears. She turned, kissed him dryly on the top of his head. Asked him to speak to her.
‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘Not yet. I can’t take it in. That he’s probably dead. But he never raped Saffie.’
And she did then put her arms round him, but more as a mother puts their arms round a child to soothe them when they know they’ve done something wrong and are filled with remorse. Much as she’d done with Saffie earlier.
19
HOLLY
Pete comes over to me as I get back. I hang my coat up and take off my boots. He puts his chunky arms around me and I let them envelop me. It doesn’t matter to me at this moment whose arms they are. I need someone – anyone – to hold me.
‘I was so worried about you,’ he says. ‘Going off like that. Knowing how distraught you were.’
‘I needed space,’ I say. ‘I needed air, and to be alone.’
‘I understand,’ Pete says.
‘I met Saffie,’ I say into his chest. ‘When I told her they’d found a body, she broke down and confessed. Saul didn’t rape her. He didn’t touch her. He had nothing to do with her pregnancy, nothing.’
‘Oh, Holly.’ Pete releases me and walks over to the mantelpiece and leans against it, his head on his arms.
‘I know. It’s too late. Not that it makes any difference. The damage was already done the day Saul overheard us.’
Pete doesn’t reply to my barbed remark, loaded with the resentment I feel again for his doubting Saul. But it isn’t fair of me. Because the damage was done before that, when I asked Saul if he’d made Saffie have sex with him and he’d told me to get out of his room.
Pete doesn’t tell me either – not yet, anyway – that the police have been for Saul’s dental records. Which is as well, because I couldn’t take any more just now. After a while, he straightens up. He goes to the kitchen, comes back, puts a glass of whisky in front of me.
I sip the whisky. I can’t bear sitting in silence with Pete, so I go upstairs. But then I can’t stand being alone in our bedroom and go to the bathroom. I rummage in the medicine box for the Xanax I used after Archie died. I have no idea whether it’s still in date, but I need something to take away the pain of being awake. The light’s too bright, even when I try switching off the bedside lamp. It isn’t the light that’s too bright, of course; it’s being here at all, knowing about Saul. His remains. What did they mean? Why couldn’t they remove them? I sit on my bed, wondering whether, if I crawl under the covers, I will sleep. After I don’t know how long, I’m still sitting there. Someone is ringing the front doorbell and I hear Pete open it, his lowered tones. ‘I think she’s asleep. I’ll go and look.’
*
Fatima sits on the sofa in the sitting room. Something about her makes me want to crawl into her arms like a baby. Pete’s drawn the curtains, switched on the lamp; he’s even lit a fire in the wood burner. The room feels rather womb-like. I prefer being here, with people, I think, than upstairs, alone in the bedroom. Or perhaps it’s the drugs beginning to work. Or perhaps anywhere is better than the last place. Until it too becomes unbearable.
‘Pete’s explained to me that the girl admitted she lied. About the rape,’ Fatima says. ‘I’ve informed my colleagues and they’re following it up, in case it has a bearing on their investigations. But more importantly, how are you, Holly?’
‘Bad.’
‘Of course. But it won’t be long now.’
‘How long?’
‘They’ve had a bit of trouble with the identification,’ she says briskly. This briskness, I understand, is because what she has to say is unpalatable. She wants to get it over with. With as little apology or sentiment as possible. ‘The dentist contact Pete gave us – they have no records for Saul.’
The room sways. I have to steady my voice.
‘I haven’t registered him with a dentist since we moved here.’ I feel muzzy. Unable to make sense of what she’s saying. It might be an effect of the sleeping pills on top of the whisky. It might be the slow after-effects of shock. It would be better to be sharper, not to have everything blurred by these numbing drugs. I need to think straight. ‘It was lax of me,’ I go on. ‘His last dentist was in London, and she retired, and . . .’
‘The details I gave Fatima were for the girls’ dentist,’ Pete says. ‘I wasn’t thinking. I assumed Saul had been to the same one, but of course why would he have been?’
‘Is there anyone from his previous dental surgery, the one in London, we can contact for the records?’ Fatima is looking at me.
The muzzy feeling is slowly clearing, like an early morning mist lifting from the Fens. And I become brutally aware of what I couldn’t quite work out before. It’s that I don’t like this conversation. I don’t like it at all. Don’t they usually, by this time, ask the next of kin to go to the morgue to identify the body? Can’t they identify it with the DNA samples I’ve given them? Why do they need dental records? The remains must be so horribly mutilated there is nothing recognizable left of them. I don’t want to think about this, but my mind pursues the thought – it hasn’t been long enough, surely, for a body to have decayed so much. Apart from its teeth?
‘I don’t understand why you can’t identify him with the DNA.’
‘Holly,’ Fatima says slowly, ‘the body parts were found in a burnt-out bird hide. There was very little left. It seems . . . he tried to get rid of his own remains. Unless . . .’
The next words I hear are muffled, something to do with their investigations looking into the possibility of it being murder, not su
icide. But the room goes dark, Pete recedes, the stars swirl about my head, and Pete puts a bowl in front of me just in time for me to throw up.
*
I don’t know how much later it is that I come back to consciousness. I’m leaning up against the sofa, a rug round my shoulders, and Pete is holding my hand. Fatima is still there.
‘Take your time,’ Fatima says, gazing at me steadily through her large brown eyes. ‘I know this is hard for you, Holly. But we have to ask you . . . about the dentist.’
When I can speak again, I say, ‘The practice closed down after his dentist retired. It was hers. She sold up and moved away.’
‘His records have to be somewhere,’ Fatima says. ‘Dentists can’t just destroy them because they’re retiring. They’ll be on a system.’
‘I’m such a terrible mother!’ I say, my thoughts sliding about all over the place. ‘I never registered him here. But Saul’s always had good teeth. I didn’t think it was necessary to continue with six-monthly check-ups.’
‘Good teeth?’
‘Filling-free. I fed him a strict low-sugar diet from the beginning.’
Through the mists, I think what very minimum-fun parents Archie and I were. Insisting on breadsticks rather than biscuits, nuts where other children had sweets. A vignette slips into my mind, me and Jules next to each other at one of the London lidos in the summer. Saul and Saffie wrapped in towels, dripping with swimming-pool water, Jules producing from her voluminous tote a packet of supermarket chocolate brownies, while I drew some mini rice cakes out of my backpack. Saul’s expression of disgust at my offering. He’d sidled up to Jules, looked at her with his big eyes and said, ‘Those look good, Jules.’
I remember fleeting resentment – I was neither as much fun as Jules nor as successful as I’d like to be in my quest to be a wholesome mum. But how trivial those minor parental rivalries seem now – and sitting here with Pete and Fatima and their talk of dental records and the horrible image of the burnt-out bird hide, I wish I had been more like Jules as a mother. I wish I’d given Saul everything he ever wanted! Chocolate brownies and reality TV and extra pocket money. Every second of joy and instant gratification possible. For what difference had it all made in the end?
‘Well, that might help,’ Fatima is saying, and I slide on the back of the Xanax and the whisky into the horrible present. ‘I’ll let them know. And we’ll follow up the contacts. Thank you. I’ll be back as soon as we hear anything else.’
*
‘I’m so sorry,’ Pete says when she’s gone. ‘To make that mistake about the dentist. It’s delayed things . . .’
I don’t answer. Right now, I think I would like Pete to leave me alone, go back to his girls. Then I am overwhelmed by fear of being alone, of staring my grief in the face, and I want him to stay.
‘Is there anything, anything I can do to make this more bearable for you?’
He’s standing, now, his arms by his sides, looking so forlorn and helpless I begin to feel sorry for him. For both of us. For all of us.
‘I don’t think there is, no,’ I say at last, and that’s when I begin to sob.
There’s no point in going to bed. I know, even after my pill-popping, that sleep is out of the question. I sit on the sofa and Pete comes and sits by me. He puts his hand up to the back of my head to stroke my hair, but I take it away. I don’t want Pete to feel the bruise, because it would mean explaining what Rowan did to me and dealing with his response. What would Pete say if I told him how Rowan attacked me? He’d realize, of course, that it wouldn’t have happened if he’d stayed here with me as I’d asked him to do the other night, and that would presumably make him feel even worse about everything that’s happened. But nothing is worse than the news we’ve had, and I don’t want to divert attention away from it.
Pete stays next to me anyway, and after a while I let him put his arm about my shoulders. We sit side by side like those bereaved couples you see on TV, so poleaxed by grief they can barely move. What you don’t see in those shots are the simmering feelings between couples apparently united in their suffering. You don’t see how their loss has sent aftershocks jolting the foundation stones of their relationship. No one looking at Pete and me would know that my fear for Saul is matched only by my upset at Pete for the way he doubted him. That I’m only letting him sit with me for his bodily warmth and because if I am left alone, I am afraid of what might become of me.
At three, Pete dozes off for a while, his head lolling uncomfortably. I wedge a cushion under his cheek and slip to the kitchen. I wish I smoked: I’d kill for a cigarette. I think of Saffie, us smoking together on the bank of the river. I could go round, ask her if she’ll give me a fag. She, of all people, I imagine, would understand my need.
Instead, I get down an old bottle of some kind of liqueur we’ve had in the cupboard since Pete moved in, and pour a glass. It tastes of oranges cut through with the bitter tang of alcohol, but does nothing to dull the pain, to help me sleep. I go back to the sofa, sit cross-legged against the arm, pulling the wool throw over myself. The wood burner is still alight, just, the red embers giving off the semblance of warmth. I think about Saffie, breaking down on the riverbank, telling me she lied. Who made her pregnant? Who was she so desperate to protect from the wrath of her parents she sacrificed Saul for him?
In the end, I also nod off, and when I open my eyes, it’s because the front door has slammed shut, jolting me out of a dreamless sleep. I’m still sitting up against the arm of the sofa and my neck is stiff. My head throbs and I have to peel my tongue off the roof of my mouth. It’s light outside, quite bright. I must have slept for longer than I thought. I feel strangely numb, a peculiar relief.
Pete has been out. He comes and sits on the edge of the sofa, his face moist with mist, his fleece still on, the backs of his hands pink and raw from the Fenland winds.
‘I’ve just been over to Deepa’s. I had a talk with Freya.’
I sit up. I feel detached. From my emotions, from Pete’s words, from everything. As if reality is just out of arm’s reach. Or as if it’s happening to someone else.
‘What?’ I ask.
‘I had to do something. I wanted to try and find out why Saffie lied.’
‘It’s a bit late for that.’
‘Look, you may not believe it, but I love Saul too, Holly. You seem to forget that I took him on as my son when I married you. Believe me, everything that’s happened is as painful for me as it is for you.’
‘It’s not.’ The words come from far away, as if someone else is speaking them. ‘It could never be as painful for you as it is for me.’
He closes his eyes, endlessly patient. ‘Perhaps not quite as painful. But nonetheless. I am grieving for him too.’
‘You have no idea, Pete, how it feels.’
Pete’s response jolts me back to reality.
‘Christ, Holly,’ he all but shouts. ‘You seem to think you’re the only person in the world to feel pain. Can’t you see how terrible I feel, especially now we know Saul was innocent? About snatching the girls away last weekend?’
I don’t reply. There’s nothing to say. Nothing expresses how awful this is for both of us. But now, for the first time since I met him, Pete grows properly angry.
‘You actually seem to enjoy wallowing in your misery alone, determined to cut everyone else off.’ His voice is hard and cold.
I’ve never heard him like this before. It’s unfair of him, I want to object, to speak to me like this now of all times. ‘That’s not true,’ is all I can say.
‘You think you’re the only person in the world ever to have lost anyone, to have suffered. And when people try to reach out to you, you blank them out.’
This time, I do object. ‘No, that’s not fair, Pete.’
‘Look at the way you cut your sister out of your life . . .’ His voice rises, louder than I’ve heard it before. ‘You don’t speak to her. You don’t visit your mother. You turn your back on people the minute things get tr
icky. You’d rather cut them off than work at things.’
‘It’s too painful to visit my mother,’ I mutter. ‘She’s not who she was. I’ve lost her.’
‘Some people make an effort with their elderly demented parents! However painful it is. But not you. You simply turn away.’
I feel the truth of this, and am filled with a kind of shame. Even so, shame is easier to bear than the death of my son.
‘It’s a pattern with you. It’s OK for you to have weaknesses, to have flaws, but when any of the rest of us make bad decisions, you reject us. I wish to God I’d thought before I took the girls away that morning, but I didn’t. Yes, it was hasty; yes, it was even perhaps a mistake, but you make mistakes too. The difference is, the rest of the world doesn’t give up on you when you cock up, the way you give up on them.’
‘I haven’t given up on you, Pete,’ I say quietly. ‘I’m sorry if it seems that way.’
After a silence, he continues more gently. ‘When I woke up this morning, I found the text you sent. When I was at Deepa’s. Just before we heard the police had found him. The text asking me to find out who Freya was in love with.’
I look up at him, and he goes on, ‘I thought, Freya knows something. Even if it’s very little. Even if it’s not relevant. She knows Saffie as well as anyone. There’s nothing else I can do to bring Saul back, but I can at least do my bit to find out what really went on, now we know Saffie lied. Please don’t tell me again it’s too late. I’m as aware of that as anyone. And if I could rewind time, I would. I would give my right arm to do so. But I can’t. So I am doing what I can to work out the truth for your sake and so we can at least honour Saul’s true character. And I hope you believe me.’
I look at him at last. ‘Go on, then,’ I say.
‘So I did ask Freya if she was in love with anyone, and whether it was the same person as Saffie. I explained I needed to know due to everything that’s happened to Saul.
‘She said it wasn’t Saul they were both in love with – it was someone else, but she’d made a pact never to tell.’ I glance up at Pete. ‘Because she knew it was illegal to love him.’
I Thought I Knew You Page 29