‘I thought you said you couldn’t lie in bed wide awake. I thought you always had to go for a walk.’
‘I find I can put up with it much better when I’ve got a beautiful naked woman lying on top of me. I don’t know why.’
‘Enough compliments already,’ I said, trying to sound cross. ‘I’ll be thinking I’m something special.’
‘You are special to me,’ he replied, and I couldn’t help smiling, because he’d used, quite unconsciously, exactly the same words he’d written and then retracted half a lifetime ago.
‘You know what you were saying earlier about moving out and flat-hunting?’ he said, when we’d shifted into a more comfortable position for conversation. He was propped on one elbow, stroking me with his free hand. ‘You could move in with me if you like. I’ve got space.’
‘That would be a bit sudden, wouldn’t it?’ I said. ‘We’ve only spent one night together. Half a night.’
‘You’re not going to say we hardly know each other?’
‘No, but . . . move in. As what? Your lodger?’
‘As whatever you like.’
‘I don’t know, Donovan,’ I said, soberly now. ‘People are offering to put me up, right, left and centre, but I feel I ought to make the effort to find a place of my own. I’ve got to start being more self-reliant.’
‘Okay. It was just an idea. I was lying here thinking how nice it would be to see you every day. That’s all.’
‘Anyway, I’d drive you mad. I’ve got so many annoying habits.’
‘Such as?’
‘Well. I still have to sleep with a light on.’ We looked at the closed door. Not a glimmer was visible from the hallway. For the first time ever I’d forgotten.
‘You see, I’ve cured you,’ Donovan said. ‘See what a good influence I am.’
At last we went off to sleep again, a necessary tangle of limbs, and it was broad daylight when I awoke to the metallic sound of shovel on concrete. Donovan was sitting up, tweaking at the blinds.
‘What’s going on out there?’ he asked.
‘It looks like Dad’s clearing snow off the driveway,’ I said, peering over his shoulder. ‘I wonder how he got here.’
Donovan was appalled. ‘Why is your seventy-year-old father clearing your driveway?’ he demanded.
‘He’s probably worried that one of us might slip, and he knows Christian can’t do it, so—’
‘But you could do it,’ he said, tipping me out of bed as he clambered past. ‘Or did I just dream that conversation about self-reliance?’ He began pulling on his clothes, so carelessly discarded the night before.
‘If you think Dad will give up that spade without a struggle . . .’ I called after him from the floor.
A moment later I heard movement from the direction of Christian’s room and flew into the bathroom before Elaine could commandeer it for her hour-long ablutions. I turned the shower on full and let the water beat down on my back like buckshot, revelling in the pain. Perhaps it was the distorting effect of Donovan’s compliments or the clouds of steam fogging the mirror, but my thirty-four-year-old body looked fine this morning – really quite symmetrical and pleasant. I thought how my circumstances had changed in just a couple of weeks. Nothing was predictable any more. Everything was shifting. Ever since Christian’s injury my attitude to life had been essentially wary and fatalistic: happiness was at best precarious, and disaster lurked in the shadows like a mugger. Any change to my routine was a threat to be fought off. Now I could see that life could throw up some happy accidents too. I started to sing: tuneless optimism came bouncing back at me off the walls.
The driveway was cleared and Dad and Donovan were in the kitchen eating breakfast by the time I was dressed. The milk had frozen on the doorstep and came out as a plug of cream followed by a slurry of ice crystals over my cereal. Christian came in as far as the doorway. He was holding a piece of paper in his hand and was white with shock.
‘Are you all right?’ I said. ‘You don’t look very well.’
‘Have any of you spoken to Elaine?’ he asked. He unclenched his grip and I could see that the scrap of paper was crumpled around the ruby ring.
‘No. Why?’
‘She’s done a runner.’
‘What do you mean? Have you had a row?’
‘No. Nothing at all. She got up to make some scrambled eggs and then a few minutes later I heard her car start up. When I came out I found this by the telephone.’ He held up the ring and the note, which bore one word: Sorry.
‘I don’t understand it,’ he said. ‘In bed this morning she was talking about booking the honeymoon.’
‘You didn’t criticise her, or disagree with her or anything?’
‘No.’ He sagged in his wheelchair, utterly bewildered.
‘Did you say she went in her car?’ said Dad. ‘Because she won’t get far. The roads are terrible. I had to walk from the roundabout. The gritting lorry’s done the main road, but—’
‘Do you want me to go after her, Christian?’ I interrupted. ‘And find out what’s going on?’
‘Would you? I’d go myself if I could. Just ask her to come back and talk to me. Whatever she’s done I forgive her.’ He sounded so desolate I felt like crying myself.
‘Don’t worry, I’m sure it’s nothing. Just pre-wedding jitters.’ I was already squeezing past him to get to the door, grabbing my coat, pulling it on as I ran up the newly swept path. I could see from the zig-zag tracks which way she’d gone: madness to attempt to drive. The surface of yesterday’s snow had hardened to ice. I kept to the edge of the path where it was deep and softer; it creaked and crunched beneath my boots as I ran towards the security gate, which had been left wide open. Our road gave onto a hill, about halfway up. Whichever way Elaine turned she’d have been in trouble. Please, God, don’t let her have gone skidding down onto the main road and under a truck, I prayed. But as I gained the corner, I saw her red Volkswagen about fifty yards away, pointing back up the hill towards me. The tyre marks in the snow described its hectic progress from side to side before it had spun through 180 degrees and ground its rear end into an ornamental lamp post, which was now at a slight list.
She looked up as I approached, and wound down the window, dislodging a wedge of snow which fell inside the car onto her lap. ‘Oh fucking hell,’ she said, despairingly. ‘What have I done?’
‘Elaine. Please come back,’ I said. ‘Christian’s distraught.’
‘I knew this day would come,’ she said. ‘And I just can’t face it.’ Her brimming eyes overflowed.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘I’ve been carrying this burden around with me for so long. You’ve no idea.’
‘What burden? Are you saying you don’t want to marry Christian?’
‘No. Of course I want to. But he won’t want to marry me.’
‘Why not?’ A wild thought flew into my head. ‘You’re not a man, are you?’ I’d said the words before I could stop myself. Elaine looked at me as though I had finally lost my wits, and then started to laugh through her tears.
‘Now I know what you think of me,’ she said, wiping her eyes and nose on a rag of tissue.
‘No, I don’t,’ I spluttered. ‘I just couldn’t think of anything else that would change Christian’s mind. He adores you. You’ve turned his whole life around. He’s crazy about you. He wants you on any terms. Please come back and talk to him.’
Less than a month ago I’d been hatching a plot to remove her, and here I was, grovelling and pleading for her return. And meaning it.
‘Do you think he’d forgive me if he knew it was my fault he’s in a wheelchair?’ Elaine asked, looking up at me with troubled eyes.
Before I could begin to work out what she could possibly mean by this ridiculous claim, I heard running feet approaching.
‘Ah. Here he comes,’ Elaine said quietly, and for a mad moment I thought it must be Christian, brought to his feet by this crisis, but it was Donovan who slithered to a
halt beside me.
‘Is everything all right?’ he asked, then looked at the figure in the car and gave a jolt of recognition. ‘E-laine!’ he said, amazement and awkwardness making him stumble over the name.
‘Donovan. Hello again,’ she replied, and, dull witness to these mysteries, I felt the ground tilt under my feet, as past and present rose up to meet each other.
46
CAN A MAN die of guilt? does the truth always set us free?
As Elaine unburdened herself in the crippled car that bright cold morning, it struck me that ignorance is a gift whose blessings can never be counted. I sat beside her, the woman for whom Donovan had once jumped from a train and hiked across rain-lashed fields, whose nakedness he’d kept, preserved between the pages of a novel, and I felt I was seeing her properly for the first time.
‘I just can’t get over it,’ Donovan was saying. ‘You, here, engaged to Christian. I mean, what are the odds of that?’
‘It’s no coincidence,’ Elaine assured him. ‘I was sent.’
‘How? Who by?’ I remembered Penny’s words: nothing that happens here is a coincidence.
‘My ex-husband, Stuart. I told you we were separated in my twenties, didn’t I? Well, Donovan was the reason. We’d been miserable for ages before that – Stuart was a bit of a depressive – and we’d probably have split up anyway, but me having an affair with a sixth-former certainly hurried things along. It cost me my job, too,’ she added as an afterthought. ‘But that’s beside the point.’
‘I didn’t know that,’ said Donovan. ‘Sorry.’
‘Not your fault,’ Elaine said, shaking her head. She was no longer crying, but she seemed to have developed an allergy to her own tears: her cheeks were raked with red tracks. ‘We separated around the time you called it off,’ she said to him. ‘I didn’t have much contact after that, but I used to send his mum a Christmas card: we’d always got on pretty well. Then a couple of years ago she wrote and said he was ill. She didn’t say how ill, but I got the message, so I went to see him, just to be friendly, you know. We’d never got round to divorcing, and neither of us had a partner, so there was no one else’s feelings to consider.’ She paused as a couple of kids passed the car, dragging a plastic sledge. They peered at us – we must have looked pretty peculiar, parked there, slantwise against the bent lamp-post – but Elaine faced them down with a blank stare before continuing. ‘He had cancer of the stomach: he knew it was curtains. There was a reconciliation of sorts; I gave up my job and looked after him right up to his death. Quite near the end he said he’d had something on his conscience for years. He thought he might have killed a man.’
My heart lurched. I knew what was coming. Behind me I could sense Donovan holding his breath. I couldn’t look at him.
‘It was the weekend you came to see me to say it was all finished. Stuart was supposed to be away on a cricket tour, but he came back early and staked out the house in case you turned up. When he saw you leaving he decided to follow you. He ended up driving all the way to Kent, to the Fairchilds’ house, but it was such a long journey, his anger had worn off by the time you stopped, so he just turned round and came back.
‘Jesus,’ said Donovan.
It was getting colder in the car; we couldn’t have the engine on because of the crumpled exhaust. Elaine’s teeth chattered as she spoke and the words emerged in frozen clouds. ‘But a few nights later we had a huge row – about nothing, but underneath about you, obviously – a major, plate-throwing row, and he stormed out and I didn’t see him again until his illness. He told me he’d driven all the way back to Kent and parked near the house, sort of churning with rage. It wasn’t premeditated. He only had a cricket bat in the car because he hadn’t got around to clearing his bag out from the weekend. He wasn’t going to do anything, but suddenly there you were, coming towards him. Even in the darkness he recognised you by your hat. Anyway,’ she blew out a long breath, ‘you know what happened. He swore he’d never have used the bat. He just wanted to scare you. When he saw he’d got the wrong person, and that he was badly injured, he panicked and ran for it. He did call an ambulance, which was something, I suppose. But after that he never mentioned it to anyone. He was terrified he’d be done for manslaughter, or attempted murder or something. But he said he’d never stopped feeling sick to the stomach about it. Those were his actual words: “sick to the stomach”. It makes you think, doesn’t it?’
‘Oh no,’ said Donovan in a wretched voice. ‘This is terrible, Elaine.’
‘I know,’ she replied.
‘Christian took my punishment.’
‘I’m sorry to have to tell you. But I’ve been living with it for months.’
I tried to picture it: Donovan in a wheelchair; Christian walking, jumping, taking life at a raking stride, but somehow I couldn’t reel in the last nineteen years and replay them any other way.
‘We always assumed it was a reprisal for that Janine Fellowes business. Nothing like this ever entered our heads.’ It occurred to me as I said this that there was one beneficiary of this grim story: Dad. Absolved of his guilt at last.
‘Why would it?’ said Elaine, plaiting and replaiting the fringed ends of her scarf. ‘Anyway, Stuart asked me if I could try to find out what had happened to the boy who fell out of the tree, and see if there was anything I could do for him, or the family, if he hadn’t survived. He left everything to me, you see: he didn’t have anyone else.’
‘So you deliberately tracked Christian down?’ I said.
She nodded. ‘It wasn’t hard. I went to the library and checked local newspapers for August 1983, and there it all was. Once I had a name it was easy. Falling in love with him wasn’t in the plan at all. I just wanted to find out what his life was like, and how he could be helped.’
‘Well, you have helped him, Elaine,’ I said. ‘And you can’t just vanish now.’ I looked at the blotchy face of the woman who had once been the object of Donovan’s fantasies, and the real shock – that their affair should have had such monstrous consequences – was momentarily buried under a wave of jealousy.
‘I know, I know,’ Elaine was saying. ‘When he told me he was in love with me I was so happy, but I knew I’d have to tell him everything, and I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. And the longer I left it the worse it got. Our relationship was so new, and so fragile, and had so little encouragement from any other quarters.’
I flinched at this barb, but I couldn’t deny the justice of it. ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t more welcoming,’ I said. ‘I should have been nicer. It was just possessiveness, I suppose.’
‘And then, this morning I looked out of the window and there was Donovan, come back to haunt me. I just freaked. I thought: I can’t do this. I want to run away.’
‘But you won’t, will you?’
‘Would it bother you that much?’ Elaine asked me, with her frank, questioning stare. ‘You could go back to the way you were: just the two of you in your cosy little world.’
I thought about it for a second or two: that was all I needed. ‘No, I couldn’t. Everything’s changed.’ I glanced at Donovan, immemorial source of all upheaval, and for a moment I saw in his devastated expression the child Donovan, watching his own mother jump from a high window. He reached for my hand and crushed it in his – a gesture that might have been love or anguish or apology or all three. ‘Christian loves you more than he loves me, Elaine.’ The truth of this struck me forcefully, as did another insight, long overdue. Christian had never quite reciprocated my love in full measure. Even when he was at his lowest and most needy, I had always needed him more. I would do this last thing for him – I would bring him Elaine. ‘But I know him better. And I know he won’t blame you for what happened to him. He might blame your husband, but how much can you really hate a dead man?’
Elaine let out a gusty sigh. ‘Right. I’d better go and do this, then.’ Her hand rested on the door catch. ‘Will you come with me?’
I nodded. ‘Are you coming, Donovan?’
/>
He looked at me absently, lost in thought. ‘What? Oh, no. If you don’t mind. I think I’ll just stay here, see if I can do something with this car. It’s a bit dangerous sticking out like this.’
Snow was falling around us, impossibly, from a clear blue sky, as Elaine and I walked up the hill together. Not falling then, just blowing from roofs and treetops. At the corner I turned and saw Donovan, squatting to examine the stovedin rear of the Volkswagen: a practical man, glad to have something he could fix.
47
IN AUGUST 2002, in what I came to think of as a perfect act of reconciliation, Christian James Fairchild (bachelor of this parish) and Elaine Sarah Harding (widow, St Andrew’s, Oxted) were married by the Reverend Gordon Fairchild in the church of the Holy Trinity, at Knot, where nineteen years earlier, Stuart Sidney Harding (deceased) had avenged himself on the wrong man.
‘This is a special day,’ Dad said, in his opening address to the congregation. ‘There are not many men who can say they have married their only son.’
Mum came home from Nepal for the wedding, but couldn’t be persuaded to buy herself a new outfit for the occasion. ‘No one’s going to be looking at me!’ she protested. Which might have been the case, if only she hadn’t decided to disguise one of her old dresses with a hideous hairy poncho, which looked as if it had come straight off a yak. She was planning to go back for another four-month stint in Dhankuta, but it would be her last, she said, to Dad’s great joy. She was starting to feel her age, and they needed younger, fitter workers.
Donovan sat beside me in the front pew, gorgeous and unfamiliar in a suit and tie. I couldn’t help thinking, as I’d watched him dress that morning, that there was something heartbreaking about a man putting on cufflinks. The last time I’d seen him in a suit he was eighteen, setting off for work in the Cannon Street bunker. During Widor’s ‘Toccata’ he passed me a minute scrap of paper, torn from the Order of Service booklet, on which he had written one word: Always. I smiled, and kept it rolled up, warm in the palm of my hand.
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