Runaways

by Carolyn McCrae

  He had to take Susannah’s children. He had to. But it had lost him Holly. ‘Perhaps she would be better off without me,’ he thought. ‘perhaps she needs a break from me. Time on her own. Time to come to terms with things.’

  “Tea?” As he spoke she woke up and for a fleeting moment she looked as if she had forgotten what the day was going to bring, but that moment soon passed and the tenseness returned to her face.

  “Thanks.” There was no gentleness in her voice as she took hold of the mug.

  “We need to leave in about an hour.” Charles tried to speak without bitterness. “Can I get you anything?”

  “No. Thank you.” She was remarkably formal, pulling the sheet up to her shoulders to hide what he had seen, touched, loved so often and so freely. In his awkwardness the only thing he could do was leave without saying anything and shut the door quietly behind him.

  They drove to the airport in a silence broken only by occasional practical questions What will you do for dollars?’ ‘Do you have long to wait at Heathrow?’ and short, unwilling, answers ‘Amex.’ ‘About 3 hours.’

  He dropped her off at the airport bustling with the early morning comings and going.

  Did she remember the time she had spent sitting on that piece of pavement when she first arrived as a young teenager in Liverpool with her parents? She hadn’t wanted to come to England. What would she have thought if she had known she would marry and make her life there and still be there so many years later? Did she think she was now leaving for good?

  Charles wondered where it had all gone wrong as he drove along the concrete roads and headed south. “I’ll phone.” He had said as she had told him not to park, just to drop and go. “I’ll phone tomorrow.”

  “Do what you like.” She had said. “You usually do.”

  He didn’t even know if she had bought a return ticket.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The night after David’s funeral Maureen and I were in reflective mood. So much of the time since David had died had been spent sorting out the practicalities surrounding his death and we hadn’t talked properly since that day.

  I was surprised by the sharp tones of resentment as she spoke. “You shouldn’t have disappeared out of his life so suddenly and for so long.”

  “I didn’t realise time was so short.”

  “Well you should have done. He was very ill. You knew that. Yet you left us to live your own life. You always do that. There is so much of your mother in you. You didn’t even properly answer any of our letters, you said nothing in them that mattered.”

  “I didn’t think anything was changing.”

  “You didn’t think.”

  Her voice was so full of criticism I had to justify myself. “You think I had any time? I had four teenage children and a man and a house to look after, to feed to clean up after, to shop for. I had no time to myself. No time to do anything I wanted to do. No time to do anything but clean and cook and do the day to day things. When could I sit down and do anything I wanted to do? Anything I would enjoy?” I must have sounded hysterical with so much self-justification and accumulated resentment.

  “No time to write a decent letter? No time to pick up the phone and call your grandfather? You can always find time to do something if you thought it important enough. Stop feeling so ruddy sorry for yourself.”

  “I didn’t even have time to do any of the things David asked me to do.”

  Maureen didn’t answer, she waited for me to answer her unspoken question. I could have said ‘he wants me to find out if a wartime colleague is still alive’ or ‘a loose cannon may be trying to ruin the lives of his family and David wants me to protect them from him’ or ‘Max and David have many secrets I want to find out because it’s interesting’. Instead I gave Maureen a detailed answer. “David wanted me to find a man he knew during the war.”

  “Did he give you anything to help you?” I should have realised this was a peculiar question to have asked.

  “Not much.”

  “How are you getting on?”

  “I haven’t really started. I was going to but …” I really had no excuse. “… There was never any time.”

  “Just like there was never any time to write decent letters, or show any interest in your family or people who cared about you?”

  “Well it’s only been six years. Nothing much has changed has it?”

  “You may think that. I’m still here, Ted’s still in the Wirral, Monika still runs Max’s household, superficially nothing has changed…”

  “But?”

  “If you look more deeply you will see things are not the same.”

  “How?”

  “Six years has aged us all. Hopes we had had are not coming to fruition. It is becoming, year by year, too late for things to happen that should happen.”

  Maureen eventually broke the silence that descended after what had nearly been an argument. “Time for bed. We are both weary after a trying time. David is laid to rest and in our tiredness we must not say things we may later regret.”

  I was going to ask her why, in the years I had known her, she had never acknowledged that she had been David’s secretary during the war, that she had been the witness at Max’s wedding to Elizabeth, that it was because of her that my mother had met and married her sister’s lover. But the atmosphere between us that evening did not allow it. Nor did it in the weeks that followed as, although we lived in the same house, we barely communicated. Perhaps, after those years with Carl, I had forgotten how.

  It was difficult to find a job that would pay enough to allow me to give Maureen some rent but wouldn’t be too time consuming, I needed to get back to David’s tasks. I rather envied men whose manual labouring jobs required little mental effort but were well paid. The local papers were full of jobs that only required strength and a physical presence. Men seemed to earn so much ‘painting and decorating’, even the ‘proper’ jobs for men, building, driving delivery vans, security guards were well paid in comparison with the only unskilled job available to women in Surrey, cleaning. I wasn’t really qualified to temp. My typing was abysmal and I couldn’t do shorthand. Charles and Linda had tried to show me what they did in their business years ago. All that typing onto screens and using strange keyboards with disks all looked completely incomprehensible.

  I did do some work in a chemist shop, serving behind the counter. All I had to do all day was press buttons on a till and give the right change. I didn’t even have to be nice to people as it was against the company’s policy for staff to talk to customers. I stood it for a week. Every evening I was so exhausted from being on my feet all day I couldn’t think of doing anything other than sitting in front of the television. And the pay was dreadful.

  I worked as a barmaid in the local pub for a week. I got home so late that I was far too tired to do anything until lunchtime the next day and then there was no time to think about anything other than getting ready to be at work by 5. The worst thing about that job was being nice to all and sundry. I’ve never been much good at pretending to be interested in other people’s lives. I couldn’t care less whether someone’s dog had trampled through someone’s vegetable garden and I couldn’t even pretend that I cared. At the end of the week the landlord was more than relieved to let me go. ‘Not your kind of job I think.’ He said as he handed me the pittance that was my wages for the week. ‘I’ve had to deduct something for the breakages and your supper each night.’ I didn’t argue as I was too pleased not to have to go back for another shift.

  “Something will turn up. It usually does.” Maureen said as we discussed what would suit me, friendly relationships gradually being reestablished. “I wish there was something I could suggest but everything I think of would be too time-consuming. I do understand dear, and don’t worry about paying me any rent or anything. How are you getting on with your investigations?”

  I didn’t want to admit that I was hardly doing anything. It was difficult to know where to start and so the days I sp
ent in the library or up in London were usually spent doing something completely unrelated. David must have been exaggerating the risk, nothing had happened to make me think that Vijay was causing the family grief. I thought his worries must have been the imaginations of a fevered brain.

  On the Wednesday evening of my second week working on the till of the local supermarket I was sitting in Maureen’s kitchen reading through some of the notes I had made of my conversations with David, trying to see if there was anything to work on, any place to start, any evidence that there was a need to, when the phone rang. I happily put the papers aside and drew myself back from the 1930s.

  “Who?” I asked, probably sounding rather vague “Who is that?”

  “Linda. Linda Kambli. I married Ramesh, remember? The accountant who loved cricket? Linda Forster as was. I know it’s been a while Susannah, but not that long!”

  I thought back to that summer six years before. I had been getting to know Carl but Linda had been equally obsessed with Ramesh Kambli. I tried to remember the name David had given me of ‘the Indian’. I was sure it wasn’t Kambli. I rifled through the notes on the table in front of me. I found them ‘Thakersey’ I had written. Vijay Thakersey. But still Indian. Could it be possible that there was a relationship between Ramesh Kambli and Vijay Thakersey? It seemed unlikely. Ramesh had been good-looking, intelligent, relatively well off and not in the least threatening. That had been years before anyway, if he was related to David’s ‘loose end’ he didn’t seem to be too much of a threat.

  “Linda.” I tried to sound pleased to hear from her.

  “I hope you don’t mind my calling.” She sounded very formal, very businesslike.

  “Not at all.” I could play that game too.

  “Charles gave me your number. He said to say ‘Hello’ and tell you that the children are fine. Bill’s making good progress though he’s still in that hospital near Oswestry.”

  I didn’t want to talk about my children, and most certainly not hear that Bill was still in hospital when it was more than a year since his accident. I was doing my best to forget that I had anything to do with them.

  “Good.”. It probably wasn’t the right thing to say.

  “You’re not interested are you?”

  “Does it sound heartless to say ‘no, not particularly’?”

  “A bit, but then I’ve never been in your situation so I can’t judge can I?”

  “You’d probably be the only one then.”

  “You sound bitter.”

  I didn’t answer. I was trying to picture Ramesh the accountant. What had he been like? Had he been in any way threatening.

  “Look, the reason I called was I was wondering if I could ask, beg actually, for your help.”

  “You must be really hard up then if you have to call me.”

  “Well I am actually and I don’t mind admitting it, since we’re being reasonably honest with each other, that you weren’t my first choice. Or even my fourth.”

  “Running out of options?”

  “Somewhat. Can we meet for lunch and I’ll explain?”

  “I’m working at the moment so that’s a bit difficult.”

  “Oh. You’re working? I thought you were looking for something.”

  Who would have told her that? Carl? Crispin? Maureen? Ted?

  “You’re talking about offering me work? Then I will. Anything’s better than what I’ve been doing lately. But are you sure I’m the right person? I’m not very good at your machine thingies.”

  “That’s not what I need. Can you make tomorrow?”

  “Where? I’m near Leatherhead and you’re …”

  “Near Sevenoaks. Not that far really.”

  “We’re still married.” Linda began as we sat down with our drinks in the old fashioned bar in Godstone. “But only just. He moved out three years ago. He’s back in India now. Despite everything he ever said before we were married what he really wanted was a traditional wife.”

  “Despite everything?”

  “Well it was his suggestion we bought Charles and Holly out of the business and moved to Sevenoaks. Then it was really down to me, he worked for a large accountancy firm and was away a lot. So he more or less left me to work all the time and then complained when I did.”

  Even from my short acquaintance with Linda I knew no one could have thought she would ever have been a ‘traditional’ wife. He must have had another motive to get involved with her.

  “I’ve got to go out to Bombay to see him. I haven’t seen him since he left and I want to make sure he doesn’t put a spanner in the works of our divorce. He won’t come back here so I’ve got to go there.”

  “What about his family? I thought they were all over here. I remember meeting them at the cricket at Old Trafford.”

  “Some of them lived here but most were just visiting. They were trying to persuade him to marry one of his cousins. He often said that he now understood the value of arranged marriages as his parents couldn’t have made a worse choice for him than he had made for himself.”

  I didn’t usually listen to other people’s problems with much sympathy but I did listen to Linda because she spoke with absolutely no self pity. It seemed obvious to me that whatever Ramesh had wanted from the marriage he had got quickly.

  “It’s good to hear that Carl and I weren’t the only ones from that summer to have broken up.”

  “We all have.” It took me a while to understand the implications of her reply.

  “Charles? Charles and Holly? Maureen said something but I thought she was only trying to get at me.”

  “She left when your brood arrived apparently. She made the excuse that her grandparents in Canada were very ill and needed her, but really it was because Charles was pretty insensitive.”

  “Never.” I couldn’t resist the cheap jibe and was rewarded with a small laugh.

  “You know Holly couldn’t have children don’t you? It was too much for her to take yours in when she hadn’t come to terms with never being able to have her own.”

  “Pretty insensitive of him.” I agreed. “I suppose Monika’s helping him out.”

  “No. It seems Max has lost patience with your brother, he’s asked to be bailed out once too often. He’s having a bit of a hard time with your children I gather.”

  I was happy to hear about Linda’s problems but I didn’t want to hear about those that should, perhaps, have been mine.

  “So we’ve all broken up.”

  “Me and Ram, well that’s pretty much over, there doesn’t seem to be much hope for you and Carl but I do think Holly will come back to Charles.”

  “I thought you and he…”

  “No never, well once, but it as never serious. I’m not his type.” She brushed my questions aside “Have you anyone else on the horizon?”

  I was surprised at the question but was reminded that Linda was never backwards in coming forwards and would always say what she meant.

  “No. I don’t think I’m cut out to love anyone but Carl and that didn’t work. I so wanted him to marry me and we would live happily ever after but he never asked me.”

  “And you didn’t ask him?”

  It hadn’t occurred to me.

  “Do you think he might be pretty insecure himself? Perhaps he wanted you to make the running, so he couldn’t be rejected if he asked you.”

  “Perhaps. But I didn’t so it’s history isn’t it? Anyway he was having an affair with someone else.”

  “That doesn’t mean he didn’t love you.”

  “How do you make that one out?”

  “I think men are different.”

  “Never!” I used what I hoped was a light sarcastic, disbelieving tone of voice.

  “Seriously, take it from one who has twin brothers. They can be completely obsessed with someone, in love with them for life, completely and utterly besotted for years and years and years but still have sex with someone else.”

  I must have looked interested, and I was becaus
e she had spoken with such utter conviction.

  “Take my lovely big brother Crispin. He’s been in love, and I mean really in love, with Holly since the moment he first set eyes on her. He watched as she was obviously infatuated with Carl, then as she went off to university and met Graham, God wasn’t he gross! I hated him, everyone hated him yet she still married him. Crispin tried to persuade her not to marry him but still went to their wedding. It tortured him as he watched Holly get more and more unhappy. But he still didn’t do anything to tell her how he felt, even when she left Graham and went to stay with Crispin and Oliver in Oxford. Then she went back up north and got involved with Charles. And he still watched. He said nothing, he said the time was never right, as she moved in with Charles and they began to make a life together and then married. They seemed happy. And then he had to watch as she grew unhappier and then she left. But all through this, more than ten years of being in love with Holly, Crispin has had girlfriends. I know he’s got at least one he certainly has sex with. I haven’t a clue who she is but he sees her often and on a regular basis. But that never stopped him from loving Holly. He still does. He always will.”

  “But we’re not here to discuss the family are we?” I wanted to get the conversation back on track. “However mixed up we are we all muddle through. I thought you called me yesterday to beg my help not talk about family and tell me Carl still loves me even though he has sex with all and sundry.”

  We both knew that was not what Linda had said but the awkward moment passed as she shifted into business mode.

  “Well, yes. I’ve got to go to India. I don’t know how long I’ll be there. We got married in Bombay so we’ve got to see how it’s best to divorce there. I’ve got to persuade him to end the marriage and then we can both move on. While I’m away, it might be two or three weeks, I need someone in the office.”