Before the Poison

by Peter Robinson

  ‘So you stuck with her?’

  ‘Yes. What else could I do? Pretty soon I was entering my teens, and she was seeing Gray regularly. He seemed OK at first. Not the fullest bottle in the row, you know, but OK. It was only after they got married that he really started to show his true colours. I remember the first time clear as day. I was there, sitting at the table doing my homework. Mum was fixing dinner, and he came home late from an afternoon in the pub with his mates, pissed as usual. Mum said something, made some sarcastic comment, and he just punched her in the face, quick as lightning. No warning, nothing. Just turned, and smack. Not a slap, but a real punch. Meaty. Mum swayed then she just stood there, horrified, blood running down her chin, dripping on her white cotton blouse, then she put her hands to her face and ran to the bedroom, crying. I felt my skin crawling, my heart in my throat. I thought it was going to be me next.’

  ‘But it wasn’t?’

  ‘Not that time. He just held my chin in his hands tight, so it hurt, breathed alcohol fumes all over me and said, “Let that be a warning, young lady.” Then he laughed and went back to the pub.’

  She was starting to fidget with her hands, and once or twice she put her fingers to her mouth to chew on. ‘Are you OK?’ I asked. ‘Because you don’t have to go on.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind a smoke.’

  I’d given up years ago, and smoking is practically illegal in California, but I just nodded. ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Louise lit a Marlboro Light and blew out the smoke with a sigh. ‘There’s not much more to tell, really. A couple of nights later the midnight visits to my room started. There was nothing I could do. He was much too strong. Believe me, more than once I thought of killing him myself.’

  ‘Did you tell your mother?’

  ‘No. There wouldn’t have been much point. She wouldn’t have wanted to believe it, and it would have only added to her burden. He kept on hitting her, and in the end it was all she could do to gather what little strength and dignity she had left and move us out of there.’

  ‘Where did you go?’

  ‘Not far enough. Another suburb farther inland, on the river. A small apartment. Just the two of us. I had some of the happiest days of my life since my childhood there. Mum would help me with my homework – she was clever – and she’d cook really beautiful meals. Moreton Bay bugs. Delicious. On weekends we’d pretend we were tourists and take a drive along the Sunshine Coast or the Gold Coast. We’d even go to the Big Pineapple and the Australia Zoo.’ She seemed lost in her memories for a moment, and a ghost of a smile passed across her features. ‘Then I came home one day from school,’ she said in a flat tone. ‘I was sixteen. Mum was on the floor, that good heart of hers blown all over her favourite Axminster carpet. Gray was sitting on the sofa, the shotgun still in his hands. Most of his head was gone. That was eight years ago.’

  I didn’t know what to say, so I swallowed and kept silent.

  Louise looked at me. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It is a bit gruesome, isn’t it? Not at all like movies or TV.’

  I wanted to tell her about Laura, that I had sat with someone I loved and held her hand as she died, took her in my arms as her last breath fluttered from her exhausted body, but I didn’t. What good would it do? Was it supposed to trump her story, create a bond of sympathy between us? I just shook my head slowly.

  ‘After that, things were a bit of a blur for a while,’ Louise rushed on. ‘I went back to live with my dad in Brighton. He was still getting those bouts of depression, but he was seeing a shrink and learning how to cope better. And I didn’t mind taking care of him when he was down. I guess I didn’t inherit Mum’s gene on that one.’ She flicked her cigarette end into the fireplace.

  ‘Maybe your grandmother’s?’ I said. ‘She was a nurse.’

  ‘I know. But she was a murderer, too, wasn’t she?’

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ I said.

  She gave me a sideways glance through narrowed eyes. ‘Uncle Rolly said you were on some campaign to clear her name.’

  ‘I’m not on any campaign, I just have my doubts about what happened, that’s all. Would it make any difference to you?’

  ‘If my grandmother wasn’t a murderer?’ Louise contemplated the idea for a moment. ‘Yeah. Yeah, I suppose it would.’

  ‘When did you hear about Grace?’

  ‘When Dad knew he was dying. He was trying to explain his depressions and let me know that he had some understanding about how I felt when my mum was killed. I don’t know if that was the cause, or if the depressions were just a clinical thing, but it seemed important to him to talk about it. To be honest, he didn’t know that much. Just shared a few of his childhood memories. He was too young to follow the trial, and then his aunt and uncle brought him to Australia. He got on with his life and didn’t ask too many questions about his past, like most people who end up there. It’s a very long way from Pommy-land, and most of us prefer it that way.’

  ‘How did it make you feel?’

  ‘How did it make me feel? You sound like my shrink.’ She gave me a disappointed glance, then went on. ‘Oh, I suppose I was angry with Dad at first, for not telling me all those years, because he’d never talked about her before. But when I thought about it, I realised he couldn’t, really, could he? I mean, what do you say? And I was a bit sad, too, but more about losing my illusions than anything else. I had always thought of the Websters as my grandparents. Granny Felicity and Grandad Alf. We’d always been really close. But suddenly they weren’t who I thought they were any more. That hurt. I still loved them the same, of course, as they loved me, but it just felt different.’

  ‘What did your father actually tell you?’

  ‘Not much. Just what she’d done, you know, and what happened to her. He told me that his mother had been hanged for murdering his father back in England when he was seven, and he told me about the lover and all. Sam Porter. He said he didn’t remember much about it. Well, you wouldn’t, would you? Not at that age. But it’s like a cancer growing in me. I can’t forget.’

  ‘Not even now?’

  Louise shook her head. ‘I don’t mean I think about it all the time or have nightmares or anything. I don’t. I sleep fine. I just feel blighted, heavy, cursed. I can’t really explain it. First Mum and Gray, then finding out about Grandmother and Grandfather. Maybe it would make a difference if my grandmother turned out not to be a murderer, though I never even met her. I do feel I know her a little bit. Maybe he did pass on some of her genes. I have to say she doesn’t strike me as the murdering kind. But what do I know? I didn’t even spot Gray for what he was at first. I’m taken in by surfaces just as much as everyone else. I couldn’t even help my own mother.’

  ‘It wasn’t your fault.’

  She glared at me. ‘Everyone says that. But I should have been there, been with her. I had a tummy ache that morning, and I so wanted the day off school, but it wasn’t long from exam time, and she made me go, thought I was malingering. I was sick as a dingo. I should have been at home. I should have saved her.’

  ‘Or died with her,’ I said.

  ‘Even that would have been better, I think, sometimes.’

  ‘What happened when you went back to live with your dad?’

  ‘What happened? Dad did his best. I had everything money could buy. He was only in his fifties then, at the peak of his career, making good money. But I blew it.’

  ‘How did you do that?’

  ‘It was easy. It’s amazing what a few snorts of coke and a bottle of vodka will do. I suppose I didn’t much care for myself, or my life, so I just kind of drifted with the flow, took whatever pills or powders were handed me, ended up with the rest of the flotsam and jetsam. I dropped out of uni after my first year, lived in Sydney for a while, in Kings Cross, with a bloke twice my age, a dealer. Hitchhiked to Perth with a few long stops on the way. It’s the usual story. I did heroin, gave twenty-dollar blowjobs to pervs for a fix. I drank until I couldn’t feel the pain
or see the images in my mind any more. Woke up in more strangers’ beds than you’ve had hot dinners. Spent a few months in jail. You must know the story. It’s common enough. Pathetic.’

  ‘I’ve had a few friends whose kids have gone off the rails like that,’ I said. ‘And not always with as much reason as you had.’

  ‘There’s never a reason,’ she said. ‘Only an excuse.’

  ‘I don’t know. Don’t be so hard on yourself. I guess I was lucky with my own kids.’

  ‘Luck has nothing to do with it.’

  I could see that there was no point arguing this matter with Louise. She had come to her own unshakable conclusions, and a certain vehemence, almost evangelical, had crept into her voice. I could hear the unmistakable tone of self-blame, and wondered whether, along with the piercings, she also went in for self-harm. I had known kids back in LA who had done exactly that, slashed themselves with knives, burned themselves with cigarettes. I wanted to cool Louise down, not fan the flames of her self-hatred. ‘But you came out the other side,’ I said.

  She nodded. ‘When Dad first got sick with cancer – oh, three or four years before he finally died – I went back home and cared for him. I was about twenty-one then, and I was a mess. But I quit drugs and booze, stayed away from men, got some professional help from a colleague of Dad’s shrink.’

  ‘Is that when you went to the movies nearly every day?’

  She gave me a surprised glance. ‘You remembered. Yes. It was my escape, just like you said. Granny Felicity was a great help, too, though she was in her eighties by then and starting to show Alzheimer’s symptoms. She’s in a home now. I go and see her sometimes, but she doesn’t know me. It’s too sad. Anyway, I got into a computer course and it turned out I was quite good at it. I’m not saying life wasn’t tough, and there weren’t times I thought of giving up, or even ending it all, but for some reason I held on. I guess Dad being sick gave me a reason to stay alive. Isn’t that weird? Then, last January, he died.’

  ‘And now you’re here.’

  ‘Yes. As it happens, I’ve got a job offer here through some contacts I had in Melbourne. Down in Cambridge. Computers. I start next week.’

  ‘Congratulations. I thought the brain-drain usually went the other way.’

  ‘I was headhunted.’

  ‘I see. So what else did your father tell you about his life here?’

  ‘Very little.’ Louise surveyed the room. ‘He told me about this house, described growing up here, what he remembered of his mother – her kindness, her gentleness, her smile, the sound of her laughter, her lovely singing voice, her love for him. All so cruelly taken away. But he didn’t understand what was happening, the trial, the execution. He was only seven, eight when he left, and he somehow got stuck with the impression that she must have been evil.’

  ‘Did he talk much about Sam Porter?’

  ‘Not much. He didn’t know him. They never met. At least, he doesn’t remember that they did. I think my grandmother must have been very discreet in her affairs.’

  ‘Affair,’ I said. ‘As far as I know, she only had the one.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘And one indiscretion was enough.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Have you read the trial account?’

  ‘I didn’t know there was one.’

  ‘Want to?’

  She paused. ‘Please.’

  ‘I’ll lend you the book. So what else did your father tell you about Grace?’

  ‘It wasn’t so much what he told me that impressed me,’ said Louise. ‘It was the stuff in the box he gave me.’

  I felt a little frisson of excitement run through me. ‘What do you mean?’ I asked. ‘Stuff?’

  ‘Her things. What was left. The box of stuff they brought over from England. Granny Felicity told Dad that when she went to stay with my grandmother when the police started asking questions, my grandmother gave her some odds and ends and asked her to keep them for her in case things didn’t turn out well. She had a bad feeling, and she didn’t want the police going through her private stuff. What do you call it, a foreboding? Anyway, when Granny Felicity started to get ill, she passed the box on to Dad, to keep the memory in the family. There’s not much. But it was enough for me. It brought my grandmother to life.’

  I felt my pulse quicken, but I didn’t wish to appear overeager in front of Louise, lest she think me ghoulish. After all, this was her grandmother we were talking about. ‘What are these things?’ I asked. ‘Photos?’

  ‘Some, yes, mostly from the war.’

  ‘Letters?’

  ‘There aren’t any letters. They must have got lost somewhere, or somebody must have destroyed them.’

  I tried to hide my disappointment.

  ‘There’s the journal,’ Louise said.

  ‘Journal?’

  ‘Yes, an old leather-bound thing. Grandmother’s journal. Granny Felicity told Dad that Grandmother kept it in a secret drawer in the escritoire, and she took her up one day and got it out for her. That’s how I knew about the drawer. Granny Felicity told Dad, and he told me.’

  ‘Good Lord. Does it say . . . I mean, is there any . . .?’

  ‘It blew me away. Maybe you’d like to read it?’

  ‘You know I would. You brought it with you all this way from Australia?’

  ‘Like I said, there’s not much. But I think she wanted it preserving. Maybe it was her legacy. Or maybe she was just trying to keep it from public scrutiny. She probably knew what was going to happen, the arrest and trial and all. I’m planning on staying here, so I brought all my worldly goods with me, all I cared about, at any rate, and my grandmother’s stuff is among my most valuable possessions, the only ones, really, apart from a few mementos of Mum and Dad. If you want to see it, you’ll have to come to Staithes in the next couple of days, though, before I head down south.’

  ‘There’s nothing I’d like more than a day at the seaside.’

  16

  Extract from the journal of Grace Elizabeth Fox (ed. Louise King), December, 1941–January, 1942. Singapore

  Monday, 8th December, 1941

  It is hard to believe that our carefree year of golf, tennis, tea dances, afternoon siestas and Singapore Slings at the Raffles Hotel may soon be over, but today the war has come to our little island. The Japanese have bombed us. There were no warnings, and the casualties have been pouring in all day. Major Schofield said at lunchtime that we still should not worry. We have our guns pointed at the sea, and a land invasion is impossible. At worst, he allowed, we may undergo a minor siege, but even that, he felt, was unlikely. Happily, tonight’s dinner dance at the Cricket Club has not been cancelled, and my shift will soon be over!

  Thursday, 11th December, 1941

  The HMS Repulse and HMS Prince of Wales have both been sunk off the Malay coast. We are told to expect more casualties in the coming hours, mostly burn victims, which are most difficult and heartbreaking to deal with. I fear poor Brenda will be worked off her feet after her experience with the burns hospital at Bangor, and she is already suffering so much with the heat and humidity here, not to mention the mosquitoes!

  Thursday, 18th December, 1941

  Life goes on much as normal, apart from the air-raid precautions. We did not get as many survivors of the naval disasters as we expected, and one of the V.A.D.s told me she had heard nearly 1,000 men were killed. The Japanese are advancing south and west from Kota Bahru. There is now fierce fighting across the Straits of Johor, and many people are fleeing south to safety in Singapore. According to one of our casualties from the Suffolk Regiment, the refugees are blocking the roads with their cars, rickshaws and bicycles, and the relief troops cannot get through. The Japanese planes are constantly strafing and dive-bombing them. He also told me that the jungle is proving no barrier to the Japanese. They are running rings around us. They can shoot straight, too, he says, contrary to the rumours that went around. The Alor Star Hospital, in the far north, has already been evacuated. Th
ey loaded all their patients on to an ambulance train and headed south. We can only try to carry on as if all will be well. After all, the north is still a long way away, and we have strong defences.

  Thursday, 25th December, 1941

  We had a fine Christmas dinner at Raffles Hotel with the civilians and the surgical staff. It was all rather depressing for a while because of the news of the Japanese advance, which shows no signs of halting or slowing down, but in the end we decided it was Christmas, so we ought to try to forget our troubles for a while and enjoy ourselves. Naturally, there was dancing afterwards, though I spent much of the time sitting it out. Whenever I see people dance, I think of Stephen Fawley, who disembarked from the Empress of Australia at Hong Kong with the rest of his regiment. It seems so long ago now. I am troubled by rumours I have heard about the behaviour of Japanese troops in Hong Kong. It is so hard to get any reliable information here. Even if people do know something, they are more than likely to keep it a secret as if information were some kind of currency. I am almost certain that Hong Kong has surrendered to the Japanese, but I have no idea of the fates of those sisters and military personnel there. We can find no news of Kathleen or Doris, or of Stephen and the others. For Christmas, Brenda very thoughtfully gave me a waterproof oilskin bag for my journal. I can hang it around my neck under my clothing, complete with pencil stubs! I gave her a lovely hand-painted Chinese fan I found at the Sungei Road market to help her keep cool.

  Wednesday, 31st December, 1941

  Today we evacuated over a hundred convalescent Australian patients to free more beds here. It was a sad day for me, as I had come to know some of them, and the sisters who accompanied them, quite well over the past year. I waved goodbye to Amelia, to Gillian, to Florence, Jimmy, Mick and Kenny. We have only one hospital ship now, a decrepit old riverboat called the Wu Sueh, and we are making arrangements to ship more patients to Sumatra when they are well enough to travel. The fighting up north is getting fiercer and closer, and we are receiving a steady stream of wounded coming in daily. The air raids continue, and we also have many civilian casualties to contend with. We are all so rushed off our feet I barely have time to scribble this before bed. The blackout is annoying. Last night, crossing the grounds after my shift, I tripped over a root and almost sprained my ankle.