Runaways

by Carolyn McCrae

  “Very easily. I told you. He changed.”

  “That would explain why I couldn’t find the firm in the phone book and all your numbers were unobtainable.”

  “So you did try to contact us?”

  “Eventually.”

  “After the big break-in Max became positively paranoid, he seemed petrified that someone was coming to get him. He never went out of the house, never allowed visitors…”

  “I visited him.”

  “When?” Ted was surprised.

  “In January a couple of years ago. January ‘85”

  “How was he?”

  “Rude, secretive to start with but I was able to break through. You see I knew stuff about him and I told him something of what I knew. He told me a lot, some I knew some I didn’t. You see David asked me to do something which meant I have had to learn about Max and his colleagues, and what they got up to before during and after the war. I’m some of the way through it but have so, so much more to do.”

  “Anything you’re going to tell me?”

  “Not yet. Just like there’re things you know that you’re not telling me!”

  “Susannah, seriously, we’ve talked about everyone but you. What are you doing in this flat? What happened to you? Why did you go silent and lose contact with all your friends.”

  It was not going to be easy to answer and there would have been a time when I wouldn’t have been able to be so honest, I would have put a rosy gloss on my actions and painted myself as the victim of circumstances and malevolence. But I had grown up.

  “I made a mistake.”

  “I never thought I’d hear you say that.”

  “It was a bad one. I got married.” I couldn’t help noticing the effect this had on him. “And then I got divorced.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.” He didn’t sound it.

  “It was the best thing to happen. I had what people in glossy magazines call ‘a good divorce’. I took him to the cleaners.”

  “Then why this?” Ted looked around him. “There’s nothing wrong with the flat, but the area leaves a lot to be desired.”

  “Inertia I suppose. I didn’t want to move to anything larger. I had luxury when I was married, and there didn’t seem much point in buying a house just for me when I’m not here very often. I’ve travelled a lot, it’s been easy I suppose.”

  “And the spoils of your divorce?”

  “In the bank. I know you don’t approve, and I wouldn’t normally, but he really was a manipulative little shit. It seems that he had been effectively ‘hired’ by Linda’s Ramesh to marry me and make me unhappy.”

  “Ramesh?”

  “That’s why I found the bit about Ramesh being behind Max’s robbery quite frightening. Somehow his role in this jigsaw puzzle is a getting more and more significant. When exactly was that robbery?”

  “1983, August 1983.”

  “When in August? What date?”

  “Is it important?”

  “Yes.”

  “It was towards the end of the month, the 24th, 25th perhaps.”

  “And according to Bill he saw Ramesh the day before so that’s the 23rd or 24th.”

  “Ish. Why? Is this important?”

  “I’ve got a horrible feeling the robbery was my fault.”

  I began to explain about the wedding, about my knowing beforehand that it was a mistake but not being strong enough to stop it. I gave Ted an edited version of the honeymoon in Mumbai but I did include the fact that we had met Ramesh. I had to admit that everything I had ever told Jonathan about Max and his wealth had been passed to Ramesh.

  “You couldn’t have known.”

  Things were beginning to fall into place. I couldn’t talk to Ted about it, not until I had all the pieces of the jigsaw together. So I changed the subject.

  “Anyway, what are you doing now? Are you retired? Enjoying a well-deserved life of leisure?”

  “Actually I’m teaching. Not full time, a few hours a week here and a few hours there.”

  “Who? What?” It was a relief to talk about everyday life and forget, for the time being, the threat posed by Vijay’s nephew.

  “Don’t sound so surprised. Officially I’m teaching general studies to sixth form students but unofficially anything and everything they want to talk about. It’s great fun. Josie got me the job really. She circled the advertisement in the paper and left it lying around the house. Then she phoned for an application form and made me sign the form she had filled in. The only thing she didn’t do was attend the interview, though she did drive me there to make sure I didn’t abscond.”

  “You said ‘around the house’?”

  “She lives with me, boards really. She felt it was time to leave Charles and Linda, quite rightly, she’s nearly 21, but she couldn’t afford somewhere of her own and she didn’t want to share with strangers. I’ve got plenty of room and so it works really well.”

  “Another generation of the family you’ve lived with, grandmother, mother and now daughter.”

  “And grand-son.”

  “What?” It took me a few moments to realise the implications of what Ted had said.

  “You know I said she had some pretty dreadful relationships, well one of them produced a rather permanent reminder.”

  “Josie’s had a baby?”

  “Yes, my dear, you are a grandmother. He’s a lovely little boy, just six weeks old now”

  “Oh my God! What’s his name? Is he OK?” I could hardly bring myself to ask, but felt it was the expected thing.

  “Andrew is a beautiful baby, well behaved and perfect.”

  “Andrew. Was that what the father was called?”

  “Probably, though she’s never actually said who the father was.”

  “Didn’t she want to, you know…”

  Ted knew what I meant. He had helped me years ago when I couldn’t face yet another pregnancy.

  “No. She didn’t want an abortion. She talked it over with all of us and we all agreed to support her. She has no shortage of babysitters and no shortage of shoulders to cry on when she gets depressed, which isn’t very often. She’s sure she’s made the right decision.”

  “Are you?”

  “Yes. Yes I am.”

  “Wow. This is an awful lot to take in for one morning.”

  “So you’d better pack your bags, Annie my dear, you’re coming home with me. How much of all this is yours? We can come back to sort out what you can’t fit in the car some other time.”

  “Pretty much everything, and the rent is sorted for a few months.”

  “Let’s go. I don’t care how beautiful this flat is you’re not living here a day longer, it’s a dreadful area, God knows what people get up to on the street outside.”

  “I never notice.”

  I turned to Ted and was surprised to see the intense way he was looking at me.

  “Where are you taking me?”

  “I’m taking you to Maureen’s.”

  So for the third time in my life I was running to Maureen.

  Though this time it didn’t feel like I was running away from anything, rather I was running to something.

  What that was I did not know.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  “Won’t Maureen have a problem with me, I mean I wasn’t very nice when I left her last time?”

  “She is very, very happy to have you. All that is forgotten.” Ted answered, I hadn’t been aware I had spoken out loud. Ted’s voice was again unruffled and convincing.

  “You were so sure I’d come back?”

  “I hoped you would.” I was aware that he had said ‘I’ not ‘we’ and wondered how difficult the next days would be.

  “I’ll have to meet the children again, and get to know them.”

  “They may not like that idea for a bit.” Ted’s voice changed, no longer calming and confident he had to admit that that part of my return would be more difficult.

  “They don’t know me.”

  “No I
mean they may not like the idea of you living so close to them. They’ve grown up without you and have thought that you never considered them part of your life so they may not like you trying to be their mother again.”

  “I wouldn’t try! They’re far too old to need one.” I was beginning to realise the scale of the problems I would be facing.

  Maureen was welcoming, as Ted said she would be, accepting me back with no questions and no recriminations. Whatever she may have thought she said nothing.

  Most days I walked the mile to the railway station from the cottage in the morning and returned, after the main rush hour, to walk back to a warm welcome and a friendly chat. Maureen, as ever, seemed interested in what I was doing but I only told her about the work I was doing for Carl’s company. It seemed somehow too difficult to ask her about her work with David and I didn’t want to jeopardise what friendship she was offering me.

  I didn’t see much of the children, or indeed my grandchild. Ted thought it best that they carried on in much the same way as they always had and got used to the idea that they knew where their mother was, even if she was not, and never could be, a part of their lives.

  Ted was a frequent and welcome visitor at the cottage, often he was there when I got back from London and it was a very rare weekend that he did not spend Sunday with us. At the end of August he surprised us with his decision to have a party to celebrate my birthday.

  He had got together with the children and they had all decided it was the right time to get the family together again and there was no saying no to him. ‘I think we’re all ready for it now’.

  As I was fastening my seat belt for the hour’s drive Maureen, who had insisted upon driving, asked “Do you mind if I ask you some questions? I feel that there are things I need to know.” I wondered what she was talking about, she had had so many opportunities in the past months to question me about my work, the stupidity of my marriage to Jonathan Smith, how I felt about Carl.

  “Can I ask you when you started to see or think of Ted as anything other than a parent-substitute?”

  I had no idea what she was talking about.

  “Pardon?”

  “When did you realise you were in love with him?”

  It took a while to think of anything to say and my answer wasn’t satisfactory.

  “I don’t think I am.”

  “You never were any good at judging your own feelings, or those of others.” I was surprised at the hardness in her voice.

  “He’s always been a friend, a good friend, always there to help when I needed it. He was always there to talk to.”

  “He loves you very much you know.”

  I wasn’t sure what she was getting at. I decided to take what she said at its face value and not worry about anything deeper.

  “I know, he’s always been there for me, since I was a little girl.”

  “He has loved you for a long time.”

  What was she saying? I remembered the look I had caught on Ted’s face when he had picked me up from the flat at New Year. Had he wanted to hold me? Had it been more than just ‘the old friend of the family’ who had sat holding my hand and talking to me for hours? Perhaps I had almost thought of him as something more than an old friend in those few days when he had been rescuing Linda.

  Maureen concentrated on her driving for a few moments, negotiating a roundabout and heading down towards the motorway.

  “Let me tell you something. Before the war, when I was young, I watched my sister in love with Arnold Donaldson, her brother. She loved him, she belittled herself for him. My mother and I, we knew she was George’s daughter, but we said nothing. My mother always said it would be to cut our noses off to spite our faces. I should have argued with her. I very much regret that I didn’t. My sister wasted her life loving the wrong man. She had his son, she married him in the end, but he never made her happy.”

  I had never thought about Carl’s mother, my step-mother, as anything other than a witch. I had never thought of her as a woman who was lonely and who loved an insignificant man. I tried to remember the quote from long ago English lessons, something about ‘loving not wisely but too well’. I had hated Kathleen, as her sister talked to me I realised that I had never, not for one moment, tried to understand her.

  Maureen continued, it was as if she was thinking aloud and that she had almost forgotten I was in the car. “I fell in love with the wrong man too. Only he was wrong not because he didn’t love me and I didn’t love him, Dick Shelton was the wrong man because he was a pilot and we met at the beginning of the war. We were married for just under a year before he was shot down. The first I heard was one of my letters returned unopened with a pencil note in the top left hand corner ‘Posted Missing’. It was a year later that I received an official letter saying he had been confirmed as being a prisoner of war.”

  She didn’t seem to be aware that I was in the car.

  “His plane had been shot down but he had baled out. They looked after him well until his burns healed and then he was put in a camp. I wrote so many letters to him but I never knew if he got them, I never received any from him. Just before the end of the war I heard he had been killed. The Allies bombed his camp as they advanced through Europe.” I had heard that such things happened, though I had no idea whether it was true or not. Judging from the intensity in Maureen’s voice I believed her. “It was hushed up, of course, but so many of those men who had put up with years as prisoners and who were just about to be freed to go home to their families were killed by our own side. It was never acknowledged and they said he had been killed whilst trying to escape. He wouldn’t have done that. None of them would have done that. Not when they all knew the war was about to end.”

  I was beginning to worry for our safety. Maureen was so involved in telling me about Dick Shelton that she could not have been concentrating on her driving. “He was killed by our own bombers. I’ll never forgive them for that. They all knew it was happening and they ignored it, they said it was enemy propaganda, that no camps were bombed, but they were. They killed so many of those lovely, patient, brave young boys who had been shot down then lived out the war waiting for rescue. They killed him, they killed Dick, they knew it and they never said ‘sorry’.” That’s why I had to do what I did. I had to do something in revenge. She was quieter for a few moments and I thought perhaps she was concentrating again on her driving. “I loved the wrong person because he didn’t come home to me.”

  “But you fell in love again.” I don’t think she heard me.

  “I wasn’t like Elizabeth, poor lucky Elizabeth. Unlike Elizabeth I was not pregnant. I was able to forget the man who had been my husband for five years but whom I had only been with for such a short time. I was able, if not to forget him, to live with the knowledge that he was dead. That was something Elizabeth never understood, she could never do that. My widowhood freed me. Perhaps it would have been a difficult marriage had he survived the war. Perhaps his experiences in the camp and my very different ones working through the war would have meant we had grown apart. Many wartime marriages would have been disasters had the partners lived. Alicia’s was. Many others would have been. Perhaps mine would have been. Maybe we couldn’t have lived together for 30 or 40 years. But I think we would have been happy. That’s why it was their fault. That’s why I had to stop them ruining him. They couldn’t kill him but they wanted to ruin him, sending him home with nothing. After all he’d been through. It wasn’t right. So I helped him.”

  “You fell in love with someone else?” I tried again, hoping that if I could get through to her she might realise how badly she was driving.

  “Yes I fell in love again.” She had heard me but she was still talking as if from another time. “I fell for another most unsuitable man. He was beautiful, brave and clever. He was older than me, he made me feel safe and cherished. But he had to leave me. He had to go back to his own country. He wasn’t English you see. I had to help him. I loved him but I had to let him go. They were
going to take everything from him, leave him with nothing after all he had done. I made sure he didn’t leave with nothing.”

  Was she talking about Vijay? She had to be.

  “I had to let him go and I thought I would never feel the same about anyone again. I waited.”

  Maureen turned towards me concentrating on me.

  Not looking at the road.

  “I waited for years. I thought he must be dead, if he had been alive he would have got in touch with me.”

  “You were living in Hoylake? Friends with my mother?” Somehow I had to get her to break out of the past and concentrate on the road.

  “Yes. I had gone home after the war. But he would have known how to contact me. He would have found me.” She sounded desperate.

  “Of course he would.” I said trying to keep the panic from my voice as she nearly didn’t break in time to avoid the car in front.

  “I allowed myself to fall in love again. I loved a man, the complete opposite of my lover in every way. He was my age, he was English, he wasn’t exciting or mysterious. And he did not love me. He has never acknowledged how I feel about him, in 40 years he has never even mentioned it.”

  It could only be Ted. I remembered her saying something like ‘nothing has changed, Ted’s still in the Wirral and I’m still here’. But he didn’t feel the same.

  “Then you told me Vijay is alive. There was no reason why he couldn’t have contacted me but he didn’t. Why had he made his life without me? Whey had he never told me he was alive?”

  How much I didn’t know about the lives of the people close to me. But then perhaps I had never looked closely enough.

  “You loved the wrong ones too.” Still she wasn’t concentrating on her driving, half turning towards me every few seconds.

  “Me?” I looked back at the road, trying to make her do the same.

  “Your first husband, what was his name?”

  “Joe.” I was staring straight ahead, trying not to engage with her, hoping she would concentrate again on driving as we headed up the slip road towards the motorway. I was relieved when her head turned back towards the road though she didn’t relax the intensity of her conversation. “He was never going to make you happy. And Carl. You and he are too alike. You are both selfish.” Out of the corner of my eye I saw she had turned towards me again. I was determined not to look at her hoping she would concentrate on the driving. “You needed a solid, reliable person, someone older, wiser, who would have told you what to do and how to do it.” I didn’t answer, hoping that the conversation was over as we joined the unforgiving traffic on the busy motorway.