The Pull of the Moon

by Diane Janes

  ‘No.’

  ‘Was there ever anyone else? Did you never find anyone after Danny?’

  ‘There was one person – someone I met later – but it wasn’t possible.’ I surprise myself with my candour. I am telling Mrs Ivanisovic something I have never confided to anyone before.

  She inclines her head in acceptance. ‘You were his one great love,’ she says. It is no more than a whisper, her voice no louder than rose petals falling on to damp earth. ‘He would have married you. You would have been my daughter.’

  I do not reply – cannot look at her. Instead I look out of the window, across the wide expanse of lawn to where a distant figure is moving impossibly slowly along the drive. I realize it is the same bent-backed old lady I saw on my way in. Everything moves slowly at Broadoaks. The faint tick of the bedside clock marks the seconds at a more restrained pace than it would in the outside world.

  ‘Have they given you any tea?’ she asks, and on receiving my denial she presses her bedside buzzer, which summons a uniformed nurse. ‘We would like some tea, please,’ says Mrs Ivanisovic, while I wonder if the nurse is privately thinking she has better things to do than fetch cups of tea for Mrs Ivanisovic and her visitors.

  When the nurse leaves us alone again there is another brief silence. I wonder what I can possibly say to break it. Ridiculous questions come into my mind. Are they kind to you? How many people does it take to keep up the grounds? All impossibly stupid and irrelevant. Mrs Ivanisovic has pulled down her oxygen mask and is breathing into it. I feel absurdly embarrassed by this – as though I have caught her in a state of undress – so I look away, taking in the rest of her room which until now has been hidden behind my left shoulder.

  There is a second armchair, of the same sturdy build as the model I am occupying, a circular table with a vase of flowers on it, a wardrobe, and a television set which sits on top of the sideboard affair which runs along the wall facing the window. The television is flanked by various framed photographs – the one of Danny prominently placed. I stand up and cross the room for a better look, realizing with a start that I recognize the shirt he is wearing. It’s a cheesecloth shirt, in thin pale stripes of yellow, blue and white. I was with him the day he bought it in Oasis. I struggle to focus on this, because it has suddenly become important. The shopping trip in question was undertaken just days before our departure for Hereford – so when was this picture taken? I stare beyond him into the background. It’s an outdoor snapshot – head and shoulders – Danny in front of a flowering bush of some description. None of us had a camera with us in Hereford. Did Mrs Ivanisovic bring one, when she came to see us that day?

  She answers my question almost as if she has read my mind. ‘It’s the last photo we ever took of him. It was taken in our garden, just before you went away for the summer.’ She pauses, the speech a drain on her resources, waiting to regain her breath. ‘Stan had forgotten it was in the camera. It wasn’t developed until after Danny was dead.’

  A tap on the door precedes the reappearance of the nurse, bearing a tray. Two cups of tea, paper packets of sugar, a plate containing a carefully arranged quartet of Bourbon biscuits.

  We both thank her as she sets the tray down. I take my tea, more to observe the formalities than because I want it. When I offer to pass Mrs Ivanisovic’s cup, she shakes her head.

  There is another silence while I drink my tea. They are becoming awkward, these silences. It isn’t what I expected. I have not driven half the length of the country to sit drinking tea and looking out of the window. I eke out the tea as long as possible, while inwardly contemplating the contents of her first letter. Sooner or later one of us has to mention it – start the ball rolling – or should I just drink my tea, then look at my watch and say it’s been nice to see her again, but I have to be going?

  I finish my tea and return the cup to the tray. I offer Mrs Ivanisovic her tea again and this time she takes it. Her hands are unsteady. When she lifts the cup from the saucer, it wobbles dangerously, a massively weighty, unstable load. She manages a couple of sips without incident, before indicating with a gesture that she wishes to be relieved of it. Only when I have placed the cup and saucer next to mine does she speak again.

  ‘Please go to the top drawer – see – yes, there. Reach out that book and bring it to me.’

  The book is the uppermost item in the drawer: one of those expensive fabric-covered jobs, scarlet with gold embroidery. The sort of book some women use as a journal or to copy out bits of favourite poetry. She thanks me as I place it in her hands: then opens it carefully. There appear to be several bits of paper lying loose inside the front cover, but she ignores them, turning a few leaves to reach a point where a single sheet of folded newspaper is pressed between two blank pages. She extracts it and hands it to me. ‘Open it,’ she says.

  It has been folded in half and half again, the creases impressed into the paper by years of storage. It is a report of the inquest into Danny’s death. I don’t have to read it, because I was there. Instead I look up, to find her eyes looking straight into mine.

  ‘That wasn’t the whole truth, was it, Katy?’

  Words rise in my throat, but they die away before they can reach her; dissolving when they meet the air, like the remains in an ancient tomb.

  ‘There is something else, isn’t there? I have always known there was something more.’ My silence appears to fuel her conviction. ‘Stan persuaded me not to say anything at the inquest. He even made me promise not to raise it with you. He said you had suffered so much, just as we had, and nothing would bring Danny back . . .’

  I continue to sit dumbly holding the sheet of newspaper while she leaves the words hanging in the air.

  ‘I have to know the whole truth, Katy.’ When she speaks again, her voice has taken on a surprising degree of strength and urgency. ‘You see, I know there is something else – something Danny was trying to tell me before he died.’

  The door opens, heralding the return of the nurse. If she knocked to warn us of her entrance, neither of us have heard it. She is a lumpen intrusion, her navy uniform stretched over her huge bottom, her senses dead to everything beyond the immediate purpose of her visit, completely oblivious to the atmosphere within the room.

  ‘Now then, Betty,’ she says, her brisk cheeriness slicing straight through the situation, impervious to any signs of tension. ‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask your visitor to wait outside for a few minutes.’ To me she adds: ‘It won’t take more than five minutes, dear. You can just wait out in the hall, or have a little stroll in the garden.’

  Mrs Ivanisovic merely shrinks further back into her pillows, apparently resigned to the interruption. Bristling at Big Bottom’s patronizing tone, I find myself standing stupidly in the hall, still holding the old news cutting. In an absurdly furtive gesture I hastily fold it back into quarters and stuff it into my handbag, just before the member of staff I encountered on arrival emerges – apparently from a cupboard under the stairs, where I assume she lies in wait for unwary visitors.

  Feeling an explanation is warranted, I say, ‘I’m just waiting while the nurse is in there.’

  ‘Ah yes. Poor Betty. She has been so excited about your coming. So nice for her to have a visitor. She sees people so seldom – she’s very much on her own in the world, I’m afraid.’

  The words sting me like hailstones. She should have had Danny. Danny should have been here – and as for me, I might have been her daughter.

  FIFTEEN

  The broken window inevitably meant another stop to work on the pond. Simon remembered seeing a hardware store in Leominster, which had a notice advertising glass cut to size, so we drove back in search of it the next day. We soon located the right shop and were on the point of going inside when Trudie said: ‘I don’t have to come with you for the glass, do I? Only there’s something else I want to look at.’ ‘Okay,’ said Simon. ‘But don’t be too long.’ Trudie immediately walked off in a way which made it perfectly obvious that
I was excluded from her errand. I went into the hardware shop with the others: but once they were busy giving the assistant their measurements I excused myself, murmuring something about waiting outside. Back in the street I headed straight for the phone booths, where I had spotted her the day before. Once I’d established they were empty, I peered into the window of the shop from which she had emerged the day before, but there were no signs of life. My original idea that she was stealing from the house had returned with a vengeance, although I was forced to concede that whatever she was pilfering, it had to be something pretty small – something which would slot unobtrusively into her Greek bag.

  I was wondering what to do next, when I caught sight of Trudie all but running towards me. Even from a distance I could see she was agitated.

  ‘I’ve just met Josser,’ she gasped.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Down there, coming out of the off-licence. I almost bumped right into him. I didn’t know what to do, so I just said hello, and tried to walk on.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘He sort of stood in my way and said—’ here she affected a queer facsimile of Josser’s accent – ‘“I don’t know what’s going on in that big house out there, but there’s things you girls oughter know . . .”’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I didn’t say anything. I was trying to get past.’

  ‘Didn’t you ask him if he’d put our window through last night?’

  ‘No, I didn’t. Would you have? I tried to get round him and he took hold of my arm.’ Trudie glanced down involuntarily, as if expecting the contact to have left a lasting stain. ‘Then he started rabbiting on about some other stuff, so I jerked my arm to make him let go; then I turned and nearly ran back this way. He smelt horrible too. Do you think I should say anything to the others?’

  I thought for a few seconds. ‘No. Danny might want to go after him and it’s no good getting into a fight in a public place . . . and we don’t want any more midnight visits or smashed windows, either.’

  ‘What do you think he means – about things we ought to know?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said firmly. ‘From what Danny says, they hardly know him at all. He’s just being mean and trying to scare us. Come on – Simon said not to be long.’

  I set a pace which didn’t encourage talking and when we rounded the corner I saw the boys were waiting for us by the car. Neither of them was in very good humour: for some reason the glass could not be cut immediately, so someone would have to return for it next day. Simon was trying to calculate whether it would need to be transported in the back of the car, although Danny was still optimistic that it might fit in the boot. ‘We ought to have measured the boot before we set out,’ Simon was saying. ‘Even if it had been ready this afternoon, with all of us, we might not have fitted the glass into the car as well.’

  The interior of the Anglia felt airless and the seats frazzled bare flesh at the merest touch. As we drove out of town Simon continued to carp, saying that tomorrow he would get up early and collect the glass first thing, instead of wasting half a day. I thought this was a bit rich, considering Simon liked a lie-in as much as anyone else. I was about to point out that he was as much responsible for any delay as the rest of us, when out of nowhere Trudie piped up, ‘Who’s Rachel Hewitt?’

  The car swerved so violently that I had to grab the back of Danny’s seat. ‘Sorry about that,’ said Simon. ‘I thought that kid was going to run out into the road.’

  ‘Rachel Hewitt’s dead. Why do you want to know about Rachel Hewitt?’ asked Danny.

  ‘Oh heck,’ said Trudie. ‘Was she a friend of yours?’

  ‘Not particularly,’ said Danny. ‘She was on the same course as me at uni. Someone broke into her room one night and strangled her.’ His tone was completely matter of fact.

  Trudie audibly sucked in a breath. ‘Wow – did they get anyone for it?’

  ‘Not so far as I know,’ said Danny. ‘They hadn’t arrested anyone by the end of term.’

  Simon asked: ‘What on earth made you ask about Rachel Hewitt?’

  ‘I met Josser in Leominster. He mentioned her – said she was crazy about Danny.’

  ‘That’s crap,’ said Simon. ‘Anyway, Josser wouldn’t have known much about who Rachel Hewitt was or wasn’t into – she was well out of his league.’

  ‘Oh, look,’ said Danny. ‘There’s a horse with a foal – see it over on the left . . .’

  ‘Oh, how sweet,’ I said. ‘Slow down a bit, Si – look at his dear little legs – a perfect Bambi.’

  ‘Bambi was a deer.’

  ‘I know, but he’s got the same gangly legs.’

  ‘I think we could still get quite a bit of work done today,’ Danny addressed Simon. ‘It’s not four o’clock yet.’

  By the time we got back to the house my head felt fuzzy with the heat. I decided to try running a bowl of cold water and putting my feet in it – it was the nearest thing I could think of to a cool dip. We’d had a kiddies’ paddling pool when I was little. Just a simple blow-up one, two pale blue plastic rings and a white plastic bottom covered in pictures of shells and fishes, although any illusion of the seaside was always spoiled by the tiny bits of grass which found their way in on our bare feet. I entertained a wistful longing for it, while I ran the kitchen tap.

  My bowl of cold water provoked nothing but mirth from the others. ‘You look like an old woman,’ Trudie said, passing me on her way out to sunbathe.

  The cold water failed to do the trick, so I went to lie down on our bed. The open window caught a hint of breeze and funnelled it in my direction. I thought about Trudie’s question in the car. She did have an awful habit of blurting things out, without stopping to think what effect it might have on people. Of course she wasn’t to know that there might be any particular sensitivities about Rachel Hewitt. Then I remembered what she claimed Josser had said – ‘Rachel Hewitt was crazy about Danny’ – and I wondered if she had been mischief-making after all. If there had been any truth in this assertion, then it was surely not the most tactful thing to bring up in front of us both. It was rubbish of course. Just Josser trying to stir things because Danny had punched him in the mouth. I drifted into a hazy half-sleep, during which Josser’s words echoed every now and then, reminding me of my anxiety while Danny was out of my sight at university. ‘Well, you needn’t have worried,’ said a small, sensible voice in my head. ‘Danny is crazy about you – not about Rachel Hewitt or anyone else – just about you.’

  The next thing I knew, Danny was rousing me. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, holding a glass of lemonade. ‘Are you all right? I didn’t realize you’d come up here.’

  ‘I was too hot,’ I said. ‘I must have fallen asleep.’

  ‘You look a bit pale.’ He handed me the glass, a thoughtful frown drawing his eyebrows together. ‘You should have told me you weren’t feeling well. I don’t like to think of you being up here by yourself – you might have needed something.’

  ‘I’m feeling much better now.’ I sat up properly and swung my feet on to the floor. ‘What time is it?’

  ‘It’s half six. We’ve packed up for the day and Trudie’s got dinner ready. Do you feel up to eating anything?’

  ‘I’m fine now,’ I insisted.

  We went downstairs together. Trudie had made a cheese and onion flan, with roast potatoes and peas, which she was spooning on to four plates. She looked up as I entered the kitchen. ‘Where did you get to? You promised to help with the potatoes, or had you forgotten?’

  I had forgotten, but before I could open my mouth Danny cut in to say I hadn’t been feeling well. Trudie was instantly all concern, but I saw the way Simon’s lip curled.

  We took our plates and cutlery into the garden. The outside temperature had become bearable, but I declined the offer of cider in favour of another cold lemonade. It was the first time we had all been together since we got back to the house and Trudie wasted no time in embarking on the topic which had obviously b
een uppermost in her mind for several hours.

  ‘It must be exciting, being involved in a real life murder. Tell me again what happened to this girl you were at university with.’

  ‘There’s nothing to tell really,’ said Danny. ‘She was on my course and we lived in the same hall of residence – although I didn’t know her all that well. Someone – some pervert, I suppose – climbed into her window and strangled her.’

  Trudie looked deflated. Danny’s slightly bored delivery had completely undermined whatever sensational tittle-tattle she had been anticipating. She forked up a lump of potato and masticated thoughtfully, before saying, ‘Josser said this girl was mad about you.’

  ‘So what?’ said Simon. ‘Danny’s a good-looking bloke. Loads of girls are mad about him.’

  ‘Was she ever your girlfriend?’ Trudie persisted.

  ‘No. Katy’s my girlfriend.’ Danny leant across to squeeze my shoulder.

  ‘Danny could have had anyone he wanted,’ Simon said, ‘but he chose Katy.’ The note of sarcastic incredulity was not lost on any of us.

  I rose to the bait. ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Just a joke, darling.’ Simon was smirking. He knew he had riled me.

  ‘At least someone wants me.’ As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I knew I shouldn’t have said them. I saw Simon redden and Danny frown.

  ‘I wonder how difficult it would be to strangle someone,’ Trudie mused.

  ‘Depends how annoying they are, I should imagine,’ said Simon. He didn’t need to look at me – I understood perfectly what he was getting at. ‘I fancy a walk – is anyone else up for it? Trudie was saying the girls went down to the wood yesterday. I wouldn’t mind seeing what it’s like down there myself.’

  Danny hesitated. ‘Maybe Katy shouldn’t go: she wasn’t very well this afternoon.’ He turned to me, ‘I’ll stay here with you, shall I?’

  I acquiesced readily. The further away from Simon the better, so far as I was concerned. Danny volunteered to clear away and I helped him wash up: which seemed only fair since Trudie had done all the cooking again. We were about halfway into the job when Danny said, ‘I wish you would try to be a bit nicer to Simon.’