In a Good Light

by Clare Chambers

  Then Penny said, ‘I’ve got a rope in the boot. Come on, let’s go and rescue your car, Donovan.’

  The three of them went off in the Mini, Penny’s part in the accident apparently forgiven. I took the opportunity provided by their absence to change out of my dungarees into something more presentable, and organise some tea and biscuits with which to revive Aunty Barbara after her ordeal.

  I had been looking forward to this visit ever since it had been confirmed. I felt somehow connected to Donovan after that meeting on the train, and my pledge of silence. I had been carrying the secret clasped to me like a precious vase all this time. On several occasions it had nearly slipped out of my grasp. When Mum said, casually, ‘I wonder how Donovan’s turned out. He’s probably a punk rocker,’ I almost lost it, CRASH, but fortunately Mum put my snorts of laughter down to her regal pronunciation. For another thing, I always associated the Frys with drama, and I was now at an age where it was starting to seem much more important to be interesting than to be nice.

  Even in the manner of their arrival they didn’t disappoint. From the front doorstep I watched the cavalcade approach at a crawl: first, the yellow Mini, with Penny and Christian in the front; second, the recovered Fiat, with its scraped wing, Donovan steering, Aunty Barbara in the passenger seat; finally, Mum on her bicycle, French loaves balanced in the basket like pencils in a pot.

  ‘That was a piece of luck your being around, Penny,’ said Mum, as everyone emerged from the cars. She had cycled up just in time to see the Fiat being dragged from the ditch, and hadn’t heard the history of the accident.

  ‘You could say that,’ said Christian. ‘On the other hand . . .’ There was general laughter. Mum looked puzzled.

  ‘I’ve made tea,’ I said. ‘In a teapot.’

  Aunty Barbara was standing on the driveway, staring up at the house, one hand shading her eyes. Perhaps she was remembering her last view of it, from the back of an ambulance. She was dressed in a long red skirt and a ruffle-fronted blouse, deeply unbuttoned. Her black hair was divided into two short, stiff plaits, either side of a chalk-white parting. Her face was a mask of make-up, most of which came off on my cheek as she moved in for a kiss. Christian and Penny must have been similarly done over at the roadside: their faces bore matching scarlet smears.

  ‘Hello, darling girl. You’re looking wonderful. So slim.’ I yelped as she tried to enclose my waist with her hands. I’d forgotten that intimidating way she had of talking straight in your face. The heavy, spicy smell of her scent made my eyeballs smart. ‘You’re lucky, you know. Most skinny girls have no bosoms,’ she added behind her hand, in what she imagined to be a whisper.

  ‘Hello Barbara,’ said Mum, coming to my rescue. ‘You look very well. You’ve put on weight.’

  ‘I’ve actually lost half a stone,’ Aunty Barbara corrected her.

  ‘Oh. Perhaps you’re just a bit fatter in the face,’ said Mum, undaunted. She led the way indoors. ‘I expect you’d like a cup of tea after your little adventure.’

  ‘I’d rather have something stronger,’ said Aunty Barbara, who had always refused to acknowledge my parents’ status as teetotallers. ‘There’s a bottle of fizzy in one of the bags. I wrapped it in newspaper to keep it cold. If Donovan had been any longer fetching help I’d have drunk it.’

  ‘I ran all the way here and we drove straight back,’ Donovan protested. ‘It can’t have been ten minutes.’

  ‘You mustn’t mind Donovan if he gets moody,’ Aunty Barbara advised Mum in another of her loud whispers. ‘He’s nursing a broken heart.’ Donovan gave her a murderous look.

  ‘This place hasn’t changed at all,’ said Donovan in a kind of wonderment, as he carried the bags up to the bedrooms. It was certainly true that the house had seen no improvement in its general condition over the years. The bogus antique dealers had made off with one or two pieces of furniture, but other than that, everything remained much the same, allowing for the slight deterioration wrought by our occupancy.

  He went into every room, shaking his head at the weird familiarity of it all. ‘It’s like the museum of my childhood,’ he said at last, looking at the pattern of dart-holes in Christian’s bedroom door. On an impulse he went across to the wardrobes and gave one of the brass handles an experimental twist. In immemorial fashion it came away in his hand. ‘Fantastic,’ he murmured, slotting it back. ‘Unbelievable.’

  Over the next few weeks I would often come upon Donovan in the act of surreptitiously fixing things: loose switches, wobbly handles, dripping taps. It was only when I saw how easily such problems were remedied that it occurred to me to wonder why no one had thought to tackle them before. I couldn’t help inferring some criticism of our habits and standards from his behaviour, and my gratitude was often extinguished by gusts of self-consciousness and shame. There was no need for any polite subterfuge where Mum and Dad were concerned: they were delighted with his initiative and skill, and took no offence whatsoever. When he changed a fuse in the Hillman, a job that would have had Dad scratching his head and dithering for weeks, his conquest of them was complete.

  After testing and rejecting the others, Aunty Barbara installed herself in the least uncomfortable of our chairs and picked up a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which was lying open across the arm. ‘Who’s reading this?’ she wanted to know. Penny raised her hand. Aunty Barbara pulled a face. ‘It completely spoilt it for me when she went off to her tryst in rubber tennis shoes,’ she sniffed. Having dismissed D.H. Lawrence for ever, she rummaged in her carrier bag and produced a velvet pouch, which she passed across to me. It contained a teardrop crystal pendant the size of a plum. For a piece of jewellery it was monstrous, but I dutifully thanked her and hung it round my neck, so that it sat like a great pebble on the shelf of my chest.

  ‘No, you clown, it’s not a necklace,’ she said. ‘You hang it in the window and it catches the light.’ She took it off me and spun it in a shaft of furry sunshine, spraying the walls with rainbows.

  The next item was a bottle of Veuve Cliquot. ‘Champagne to my real friends: real pain to my sham friends, as Francis Bacon would say,’ she announced, handing it over to Christian. ‘Open it will you, there’s a dear.’

  Christian rather heavy-handedly thumbed the cork free and a creamy plume rose from the neck of the bottle and trickled over his hands onto the carpet. He hadn’t thought to have a glass ready.

  ‘Hmm. I can see you haven’t had much practice in the art of opening champagne,’ Aunty Barbara observed. ‘I’d better send you a crate for your twenty-first.’

  Christian refused to look grateful in advance. His last ten birthdays had passed her by unacknowledged, and she had been known to forget her own son’s Christmas present, so there were no real grounds for optimism. However, even he had to admit that this time around Aunty Barbara was an altogether more solid presence than the wraith who had tottered in through the door and out through the window all those years ago. Now she had a job, a salary, and most significant of all, a mission.

  It was Dad who brought up the subject of the impending execution while we were all sitting round the dining table eating Penny’s special cheese fondue. Aunty Barbara, it emerged, had joined a charitable organisation called Letters for Lifers, which had put her in touch with Roy Kapper, a prisoner who had been on death row in Georgia for over a decade. The last of his many crimes was a bungled robbery at a gas station in which the Vietnamese proprietor was shot. Kapper and his accomplice had both denied pulling the trigger, each pointing the finger at the other. The accomplice’s lawyer was marginally more persuasive: his client was only given life.

  ‘Do you have any grounds for an appeal?’ Mum asked. She had seen too much suffering at the mission hospital to hold sacred the lives of individual criminals. Dad, on the other hand, thought Satan himself could be rehabilitated with a proper programme of education and counselling.

  ‘If it fails I shall appeal to President Reagan as a fellow actor,’ she replied.

  ‘
Does your man show any remorse?’ Dad wanted to know.

  ‘He certainly regrets getting involved with Gyle – that’s his partner in crime,’ said Aunty Barbara, spearing a chunk of bread and stirring it through the hot cheese. ‘He says he wouldn’t mind dying so much if he knew Gyle was going too.’

  ‘Does that sound like the view of an innocent man?’ Dad wondered aloud.

  ‘What do you find to write about?’ Penny asked. ‘I wouldn’t have a clue.’

  Aunty Barbara withdrew her bread cube, trailing strings of molten cheese. ‘At first I wasn’t sure what to say. I started off with these heartfelt expressions of sympathy, but I thought that would probably make rather dull reading, so then I just told him all about me, who I am, a typical day – that sort of thing.’

  ‘What are his letters to you like?’ Mum asked, wincing as a strand of cheese stuck to her chin.

  ‘For someone who’s had almost no education they’re reasonably coherent. I’ve got one here.’ She produced a piece of folded, lined paper and handed it across to Mum. I could see the handwriting, a random mixture of upper and lower case letters. Donovan, at the other end of the table from me, was looking bored. He’s heard all this a thousand times before, I thought. Everyone who comes to the house wants to hear about Barbara’s murderer friend.

  ‘He calls you “dear lady”,’ said Mum, skimming the page before handing it back. ‘That’s nice.’

  ‘He writes very movingly about his childhood, which was miserable, and prison routine, and facing death. I was thinking of trying to get our correspondence published,’ Aunty Barbara went on.

  ‘Like 84 Charing Cross Road?’ Mum suggested.

  ‘Hardly,’ said Dad.

  I could see Christian starting to squirm in his seat. He hated this sort of talk, which he regarded as ‘arty-farty’.

  ‘Will you be allowed to watch the execution?’ he asked, to bring the conversation back on track.

  ‘Oh no,’ said Aunty Barbara. ‘I wouldn’t want to. I’ll be holding a vigil outside. There’ll be protesters like me on one side, and the pro-death penalty lobby on the other with their barbecues and frying pans. Apparently it’s the same old ghouls who show up at these executions. They go from state to state.’

  ‘There are no shortage of ghouls over here,’ Dad murmured.

  ‘Oh yes, I read about your girl in the paper.’

  ‘What girl?’ I asked.

  ‘Janine Fellowes,’ Dad replied. ‘The Home Secretary is wringing his hands over it now. She’s twenty-one, so they’ve got to decide whether to release her or transfer her to an adult prison.’

  ‘There’ll be an outcry if she’s freed, surely?’ said Aunty Barbara.

  ‘I must say the force of public opinion has surprised me. I don’t think anyone except me and the Home Secretary wants to let her out.’

  ‘That’s because the gutter press have completely demonised her,’ said Mum. ‘Anything to sell papers.’

  ‘The broadsheets are no better,’ said Dad. ‘I haven’t seen a single sympathetic editorial.’

  ‘It’s because she’s an affront to people’s ideas about childhood innocence,’ said Penny. This sort of discussion was right up her street. Christian and Donovan were jousting for the same cube of bread, which had fallen into the cheese.

  ‘Especially female innocence,’ said Mum. Aunty Barbara and Penny nodded vigorously.

  ‘The irony is that she is more fully rehabilitated than any prisoner I’ve ever met,’ said Dad.

  ‘Have you got involved with any public pronouncements, Gordon?’ Aunty Barbara asked.

  ‘I was hoping not to this time,’ said Dad. ‘But I probably will.’

  ‘More bricks,’ Mum sighed.

  ‘She’d be lynched if she was let out anyway,’ said Christian. ‘She’s safer inside.’

  ‘That’s another consideration,’ Dad agreed. ‘She’d have to assume a new identity, move to a new place, cut all ties with her family. That’s quite a tall order.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Aunty Barbara, dividing the last of the Veuve Cliquot between herself and Penny. ‘Donovan threatens to do it regularly.’

  The accused smiled at her. ‘I still might.’

  ‘I remember that time you ran away from here,’ said Mum. ‘I nearly had kittens.’

  ‘I’m afraid that’s one habit he hasn’t grown out of. He’s quite likely to take off at a moment’s notice.’

  ‘Perhaps you could leave us a little note this time, Donovan,’ Mum suggested. ‘Then I’ll know not to worry.’

  Donovan nodded placidly.

  ‘Where do you go when you take off?’ Penny asked.

  ‘Nowhere special,’ said Donovan. ‘I just wander.’

  Dad left for the Airport with Aunty Barbara before the rest of the house was awake, allowing plenty of time for queues, breakdowns and all manner of delays. He was always inclined to be early for things, and was overcompensating for Aunty Barbara’s tendency to become embroiled in last-minute emergencies.

  She had tried to give Mum some money for Donovan’s keep, but there had been the usual to-ing and fro-ing and stubborn refusals to give in on both sides.

  ‘It’s no use leaving it behind,’ I said to Aunty Barbara, as she put the bundle of notes on the mantelpiece. ‘It’ll only go to the Less Fortunate.’

  ‘Oh, bugger the Less Fortunate,’ she said, retrieving it. ‘What have they ever done for us?’ She entrusted the money to Donovan with the proviso that he use it for household expenses and not his own idle gratification.

  Her other parting instructions were that he should not smoke in the house (a courtesy she only observed herself now that she had given up smoking) and should make sure he ate heartily at work instead of raiding our fridge. To all of this he listened with an attitude of deep concentration and when she’d finished, said, ‘Can I offer some advice in return?’

  ‘Of course you can,’ said his mother.

  ‘Don’t marry him.’

  Aunty Barbara replied to this with a peal of merry laughter but no promises.

  28

  ON DONOVAN’S FIRST day at work I watched from my bedroom window as he set off for the city, stiff and self-conscious in his suit. Evidently he’d misjudged the dress code, as on day two he’d abandoned the jacket and tie and by day three he was in jeans.

  Normally I would have been on my paper round at that hour, but since turning fifteen I’d felt the job to be beneath me and had quit. To replace the lost earnings I had set myself up as a babysitter. A new breed of professional couple had started moving into the Victorian cottages near the Fox and Pheasant, and were happy to pay stupid money to escape from their own children for a few hours. I’d stuck a card in the newsagent’s window:

  Reliable, friendly, local girl (15) available for babysitting (evenings). Reasonable rates. References on request.

  I had put that last line in at Penny’s suggestion, and she had agreed to act as a satisfied customer and vouch for my character if required. Since then, I’d had a call at least once a week, and was building up a list of regular clients. It was a beautiful arrangement: the children were usually asleep, or at least in bed out of my way, the parents were delirious with gratitude, and as well as paying me, left me treats and snacks and the freedom of the fridge. I could lie at full stretch on the couch and watch colour TV all evening, uninterrupted by Grandpa’s noisy breathing and anxious commentary.

  During that first week of Donovan’s residency I had several bookings, so I hadn’t seen much of him in the evenings. According to Mum it was his habit to arrive home from work towards 6.30 and disappear upstairs, closing his bedroom door behind him. Taking Aunty Barbara’s parting injunction to heart, or perhaps remembering Mum’s cooking from previous visits, he couldn’t be persuaded to share our supper, but ate alone, or fasted, in his room.

  Then one evening that week I’d been babysitting for the Conways, my favourite clients, and because it was a warm summer night and I had the fidgets I
declined their offer of a lift home and decided to walk instead. Once I’d left the pub and the green behind there were no more streetlamps, but there was a crooked old moon hanging just above the trees to light my way, and, besides, I knew every curve and crater of those lanes and could have negotiated them blindfolded. Although it was after midnight the air was still sultry, heavy with the scent of crushed petals, woodsmoke and sweating foliage. There was no breeze, but the hedgerows seemed to seethe and rustle as I passed. As I reached the bend where Penny had run Aunty Barbara off the road and where there was almost no moonlight, I stopped to enjoy the stillness and darkness and silence. In that moment of sensory deprivation, I suddenly experienced a blissful feeling of calm, contentment, the perfect rightness of the universe. I suppose I was having what is crudely described as an out-of-body experience, and yet it was more as if my body was dissolving into the darkness.

  Presently, a twig cracked, and I picked up the distant crunch of footsteps. This roused me from my dreamlike state and I set off again. As I penetrated the bramble snare of the driveway I saw the orange glow of a cigarette tip between the rhododendrons, and Donovan loomed out of the shadows.

  ‘What are you doing, skulking in the bushes?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m having a smoke. What are you doing?’

  ‘I’ve been babysitting in the village. I walked home for a change.’

  ‘Oh, that’s where you go in the evenings, is it? I thought you were just avoiding me,’ he said, squinting at me through the smoke.

  ‘Why would I want to do that?’

  ‘I don’t know. Because your mum and dad have warned you that I’m a bit dodgy, and you mustn’t get tangled up with me,’ he suggested.

  An indignant noise, somewhere between a laugh and a cough, escaped me. Indignant because although I knew he was only winding me up, the idea of some sort of entanglement had in fact occurred to me from time to time since his arrival, most often as I was dropping off to sleep at night.