by Clare Boyd
It pained him so deeply to think that he could never allow himself to touch her like that again.
After a brief tour of the downstairs, Francesca, whom John had noticed was in a brooding, snippy mood, said, ‘Camilla, unless you want me to spend the next year painting this place, I’m going to need some help.’
‘I understand it might seem a little daunting,’ Camilla said.
Francesca folded her arms over her baggy jumper and looked up at the cornicing of the sitting room. ‘This room, alone, will take me no less than a week.’
‘I’ll take you upstairs,’ Camilla said, ignoring Francesca’s protest.
‘I’ll see you up there, guys,’ Dilys said, brandishing her measuring gun. ‘I’m going to measure up.’
Upstairs, the huge spare rooms, the vast landing and corridor, the three bathrooms, and finally Ralph’s master bedroom with en suite, did nothing to assuage Francesca’s bad mood.
‘I’m afraid there is no way I can do this on my own. For a start, every room has wallpaper to strip. The prep stage will take weeks,’ Francesca said, standing opposite Camilla at the end of Ralph’s ridiculously grand four-poster bed.
‘John, darling, you can help Fran with the prep, can’t you?’
John shrugged a ‘yes, feasibly’ kind of shrug, while inside he was thinking of how desperately he did not want to help with the preparation. His reluctance had nothing to do with the tedium of the job. And everything to do with the temptation of Francesca. At least if he was decluttering, he would be working in a different room from her.
‘No offence, John, but I need someone who knows what they’re doing,’ Francesca returned.
Ouch, John thought.
His mother perched herself on the end of Ralph’s bed and brushed a hand over the green brocade bedspread. ‘He’s always been fastidious about making his bed,’ she said, forlornly.
Francesca’s face softened. ‘What if I found someone I really like and trust? If John and I are around most of the time, Ralph might be okay with it.’
‘You’ve seen how bad he can be,’ Camilla said.
‘It’s worth a try, isn’t it, Mum?’
His mother sighed. ‘I suppose so.’
Francesca added, ‘And to speed things along, John could help us with the prepping, I suppose.’
‘So generous of you,’ John joked.
Francesca’s pretty face twitched with a smile. She tilted her head up to the ceiling and then spun around slowly, taking in the room. She exhaled. ‘I have to admit this house has a magical quality to it.’
John was mesmerised by her. A ray of sun came out from behind a cloud, straight through the window, to rest on her, as though she were the only person in the world it wanted to warm. Reflections of quivering leaves danced across her cheeks, and shots of light set her hair ablaze with subtle colours. Her beautiful soul lit up the fusty old space. Then John noticed his mother’s eyes on him. He looked away, knowing he had been caught out.
But Francesca’s spin had stopped before she made a full circle.
Ralph had bustled into the room, wearing a pair of bright orange ear-defenders, head down, humming to himself. Without a glance in their direction, he crossed the room to his chest of drawers.
‘Everything all right, Uncle Ralph?’ John asked.
‘He won’t be able to hear with those things on,’ Camilla said.
The three of them stared at Uncle Ralph as he dumped a heap of empty aluminium blister packets in the wastepaper basket at his feet, and then opened some new boxes of Seroquel. He began popping pills from the blister packets into a brown plastic pill bottle.
Camilla approached him. ‘Do you need some help, darling?’
‘THE SOUND OF THESE BLASTED THINGS IS DEAFENING!’ Uncle Ralph bellowed.
‘What is he doing?’ John asked.
‘Bipolar sufferers can be sensitive to noise,’ his mother explained stiffly, popping out the pills from another packet. ‘He says the blister packets sound like the crackle of gunfire and he doesn’t like to hear it every day. He says it puts him off taking them. I order him generic pots from Amazon to put them in.’
John turned to Francesca, who was gaping at Uncle Ralph’s fiddly, obsessive ritual.
‘It’s so sad, isn’t it,’ he said to her, under his breath.
She shook her head. Her skin had become alarmingly pale, almost translucent.
‘That’s why they were so easy to steal,’ she said, with a strange, distant smile forming. She then shot a question across the room: ‘You put some aside for Robert, didn’t you, Camilla?’
John’s heart stopped.
His mother swivelled around. The two women held steely eye contact. His mother replied haughtily, without an ounce of contrition, ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
Dreamily, a little strangely, Francesca laughed at her.
A show of disrespect of this sort would usually elicit a matriarchal sniff and a fierce comeback from his mother but, instead, she returned them seamlessly to their original discussion, using her actress-on-stage voice to overshadow Francesca’s implications. ‘I’d have to vet whomever it is you choose to help in the house. And then, obviously, we’d have to sit them down with Ralph.’
Francesca began absently twisting at her earring as she stared at Camilla long after she had stopped talking. ‘Fine.’
John felt his breathing return to normal.
‘If you drop round tomorrow with some paint samples, we can get started.’
‘Whatever you say, Camilla,’ Francesca said facetiously. She might as well have curtsied.
Camilla shot out her chin and strode out of the room.
Francesca did not move, but she was swaying slightly. ‘I can’t handle it here, John. I thought I could. But it’s too much.’
John grabbed her arm, to steady her or to steady himself, he wasn’t sure.
‘Conspiring, are we?’ Dilys was standing in the doorway, armed with her measuring gun.
Francesca nipped past John, and then Dilys, saying, ‘Bye, Dilys.’ Her footsteps were quick down the stairs.
The front door slammed.
‘Your mum’s in a stinker, too. What’s going on?’
‘The usual,’ John replied, feeling the unusualness of it too keenly.
‘John, this place is easily worth two mill, and if we do it up, we could get £2.5 million for it, no problem. The work’s more superficial than I first thought.’ Her needy, vulnerable side had evaporated. ‘Move, will you?’
She was gleeful as she pointed her gun at the back wall, disinterested in the emotional drama. The potential value of the house had taken her off the scent. For once, John was grateful for his wife’s ruthlessness.
Less gratefully, he thought of his mother’s ruthlessness and her deft fingers as she popped the pills into those pots with Uncle Ralph. Had she really been capable of stealing the anti-psychotics for Robert? He clutched at the alternative possibilities, unwilling to believe his mother could go that far.
His mother was stonewalling – most expertly. He would have to speak to Valentina again. This time, he would not walk away until she had given him some truthful answers, however uncomfortable she found his questioning.
* * *
‘Oh, no, no, no, no,’ Valentina sobbed, pressing her apron to her face. ‘I dread this questions all your lifes, my John. I dread them. No, no, no, no, no.’
Valentina had been reluctant to sit down on the sofa that she had plumped for his parents twice a day, every day, for forty years. Her stout, stockinged legs dangled awkwardly, ending well above the tasselled skirt of the upholstery, and her raisin eyes darted around the drawing room. She looked out of place.
‘Valentina, don’t cry. Please don’t cry,’ John said, feeling tears spiking his own eyelids. From her reaction, he gathered she was holding on to some bad memories.
‘But I can never say no to you, John, and Robbie, and your little beautiful chicky-dees. You so handsome now, John. You
always so handsome and quiet.’ She began crying again. ‘I can never say no to you,’ she repeated.
‘You always said “no” to us, Valentina.’ John laughed, trying to lighten the atmosphere.
‘Since Robbie died, I live with this terrible feelings, in here,’ she said, bashing her fist at her bosom.
A chill ran down his spine.
‘What do you know, Valentina? It’s really important you tell me.’
‘I can’t, I can’t,’ she cried.
‘For Robert’s sake,’ John said, quietly. ‘If Mum’s done something bad, you must tell me.’
‘No. She not.’
‘Robert’s spirit won’t rest until the truth is out.’ It was a cheap shot. Valentina believed in spirits and the undead.
Her hand shot to the gold cross at her neck, and she kissed it. She sat up straight, proudly and defiantly, and her tears disappeared, as though sucked back into her head. ‘You swear you not tell Mrs Tennant. If I not have this job, I no eat. You understand?’ She bunched her fingertips at her small mouth, in an eating motion.
‘I promise that I will not tell Mum.’
‘I tell you because I love Robbie and I love you. And the Lord, he see me.’
‘Yes, Valentina,’ John said. He felt sweaty with anticipation and anxiety.
‘Your mumma, she did very bad thing. And I tell her she bad when she do it. But she is so desperate, she not know what to do, and Ralph’s pills are in her bag and she give them to Robbie, and oh my God!’ She threw her hands up to the ceiling. ‘Lord forgive me, I not stop her.’
‘But why? Why did she give them to him?’
Valentina began to shake her head. ‘It was a terrible night, a terrible night.’
‘The night Robert died?’
‘No, no. When Robbie – bless his soul – was a young man. Dezenove anos?’
John mentally dredged up what little he knew of Portuguese. ‘Nineteen?’
‘Si. So young. So, so young.’
John was confused. ‘What happened when he was nineteen? He was at university then, yes?’
‘Terrible night,’ she repeated, then stopped.
John wanted to shake it out of her, but he remained composed. ‘Tell me what happened.’
‘Robbie was back for a weekend. He very tired.’ Valentina pressed her fingers into the pouches under her eyes. ‘He look like—’
‘—death warmed up.’ John finished the well-worn saying for her. His mother had endlessly accused Robert of looking like “death warmed up”.
‘Yes, yes! And Robbie say he’s going to bed. But he not go to bed. He go to the bathroom and he get in the bath…’ Valentina was overwhelmed with emotion again, and she began to cry silently into her apron. John did not dare to speak to urge her on. The mantel clock tick-tocked loudly. The smiling faces in the silver frames on the baby grand and the figures in the oil paintings seemed to have turned to Valentina to hear what she had to say next.
She whispered the words hoarsely: ‘He in a dry bath, with no, no water, and he taken the scissors to him, like this.’
She cut a vertical line down her throat with her finger.
John’s tongue was thick in his mouth. The shock shot around his head; a bullet that had nowhere to penetrate. Before he could absorb its full impact, he needed more information.
‘He cut his throat like this?’ John’s hand instinctively drew a line horizontally across his throat to correct her.
‘No, no, like this,’ she insisted, again moving her finger down from her chin to her sternum.
‘A cry for help?’ John asked. Robert would have known that the vertical cut would not have killed him.
‘Your mumma say he did it this way, to not die. I bandage his cut, but he is in very bad, bad way. He crying and he argue with your mumma and say wicked, wicked things, and he run down to find a knife and he shout and scream at her, and I was so, so scared. And your mumma, she so terrified, too. Oh, my. It was so, so terrible.’
‘So, she gave him Ralph’s pills to calm him down?’
She nodded. ‘She cut the pill a little bit with the knife. Tiny, tiny. She give him. And I slept in his room next to him. Poor Robbie.’
‘Where was Dad in all this?’
‘Berlin. Like always, back then.’ Valentina tutted.
‘Did Mum take Robert to Dr Baqri the next day?’
‘I tell her! Again and again. He all slurred and too sleepy. I say she need to take him to hospital. But she say ‘No!’ She so angry. I am scared of her, John.’
‘Mum is formidable when she’s angry.’
She clicked her tongue. ‘She is, she is.’
The next question was hard to form, but he had to ask. ‘What were the wicked things he was saying to Mum, Valentina? Was he accusing her something?’
Her lips pursed. ‘I hear nothing.’
‘It was about the poolhouse, wasn’t it?’
‘I hear nothing,’ she repeated, refusing to look him in the eye. John decided he could not push her too far. What she had heard that night was obviously too shameful for her to repeat.
‘Did you know that Robert carried on taking those pills, for years, right up until he died?’
Valentina nodded slowly. ‘I see Mrs Tennant take them from your uncle’s house when I clean there sometimes – he scare the other cleaners, you know – and I catch her filling those little bottles for Robbie. Many times. Many, many times. You know’ – she screwed up her face – ‘like those horrible men on the street corner with the drugs.’
He found it hard to believe that Valentina had ever seen a drug dealer on a street corner. She had arrived when she was twenty years old, straight from rural Portugal. John had been two years old, and Robert three. All her adult life she had been sheltered by the old beams and towering oaks of Byworth End, just as he and Robert had been. Then again, could life under his mother’s aegis ever be considered sheltered?
‘And she couldn’t go to Dr Baqri because of what she was doing?’
Valentina patted the side of her nose conspiratorially. ‘She scared. Very bad. Very, very bad. She not want Dr Baqri to know this bad business.’
‘This illegal business.’
Valentina put her hand together, as though in prayer. ‘Si. Si.’
‘Did Dad really not know about any of this?’
Valentina shrugged again. ‘He busy man.’
‘Too busy to miss that his eldest son had tried to commit suicide?’
Valentina straightened her apron, and plucked at a duster that was in the front pocket. ‘I say to Mrs Tennant that those pills make him sicker.’
‘It seems to me that it was Mum who made him sick, Valentina.’
Valentina’s brow wrinkled as though in pain. ‘You not blame her. She do her best. She love Robert.’
‘Yes, I know,’ John replied, but he did not agree. His mother’s best had not been good enough. A nasty swirl of anger scooped up the acid in his stomach and pushed it up his gullet.
Leaving Valentina alone after everything she had just revealed felt wrong. She needed a priest, or a therapist, to help her cope with the aftermath of her confession – or perhaps she needed a social worker to help her deal with his mother.
When she hugged him goodbye, he smelt her usual olive oil and aniseed, and he felt as vulnerable as a small boy again. She reached up to squeeze his cheeks, just as she had done when he was a child. But he could tell that she was severely shaken. Her olive skin had turned a sickly grey.
‘You take care, too, Valentina, okay?’
‘Your mumma look after me well, you know that,’ Valentina said, forever loyal.
His mother did not deserve Valentina’s loyalty. She did not deserve any of their loyalties.
As he drove home, past the village green, he envisaged Francesca at home. He should call her, he should tell her, but he could not. Every muscle in his body was drawn tightly into his bones, holding him in one piece. His teeth ached, ground together by his locked jaw. If he let
his mouth open to speak or loosened his body to express it, he feared the anger, built over decades, would blast out violently, knocking down anyone in its path. Whomever he spoke to next would get a barrage of abuse that they would not warrant.
He could not believe that his mother was capable of supplying drugs to Robert. He could not believe that his mother had hidden Robert’s attempted suicide. When Robert had taken scissors to slit his throat, John had been on his gap year: gallivanting through rainforests with a backpack, stretched out on wild beaches, partying under full moons. If he had known, he would have come home.
Shaken up, John’s vision of the road suddenly went fuzzy and he pulled over into a lay-by. Yelling at the top of his lungs, ‘FUCK YOU MUM! FUCK YOU!’, he hit his steering wheel again and again until he beeped his horn by mistake. Two wood pigeons in the trees above his car scattered into the sky. John imagined the whiter of the two as a dove flying off to find Robert.
Tears came rolling down his cheeks. He felt guilty for his outburst. He refused to process Valentina’s stories about his mother. The catastrophic information floated on the top of his mind. It wouldn’t sink in. She had misinterpreted it, or it was lost in translation, somehow. He couldn’t bear it. It wasn’t true.
Chapter Forty
Francesca
The hue of dusky pink on the walls, the white dustsheets over the lumps of furniture and the fresh paint smells ordered and settled my mind. The roller’s motion up and down, up and down, was a methodical strain that my mind allowed my body to do automatically, like driving a car. My little radio played quietly in the background. By tomorrow, I would be finished in this room.
John was clearing the next spare bedroom on my agenda. It was a bigger room, across the corridor. I could hear him moving about on the creaky floorboards. The odd cough, or thud, or rustling were the background sounds of my day. But I would rarely see him.
He had casually informed me about the paperweight incident, which he thought exonerated Robert; adding to that, he told me that he did not believe his mother was lying about the Seroquel either, and that she was certainly not capable of stealing from Uncle Ralph, whom she loved and cared for. This rosy outlook did not explain why his mood remained charged. He was pent up. He was not communicating. He had brought an invisible wall up around him. Simple questions would take him an age to answer. When I asked him if he was all right, he would snap at me: ‘Of course, why do you ask? I’m fine.’