by Susan Moody
‘I’ll think about what we’ve discussed, and come in after the weekend to make some definite plans,’ Andrewes said, an hour or so later, when Kate said she really had to go.
‘Good. I’ll have some ideas lined up for you.’ She stood up, then sat down again. ‘What about that taxi?’
A taxi was ordered. ‘Sure you don’t want me to come with you?’ Andrewes said, as he settled her inside.
‘Absolutely. And thank you . . . uh . . . Jefferson. I’ve enjoyed this . . . business evening.’
‘Me too. Maybe . . . maybe we can do it again sometime.’
‘Mmm, yes, that would be fun.’ Her tone of voice held out very little hope of a repeat performance.
It wasn’t much more than eleven o’clock when the taxi pulled up outside her house. Most of the neighbours still showed lights from behind curtained windows, including her own. She reached into her bag to find her wallet, but the taxi-driver waved her away. ‘Already settled,’ he said. ‘And the gentleman said I was to see you safely through the front door.’
Kate smiled as she walked up the tiled path. Very thoughtful of him . . . but then that’s how he came across: thoughtful, kind, safe. The exact opposite of Brad. As she opened the door, she turned to wave at the driver and watched him speed away.
A few minutes after she had shut the door behind her, the phone rang. She picked it up and heard a voice speaking through the kind of static which indicates that someone’s mobile is in an area of bad reception.
‘What?’ she said. ‘I can’t hear you.’
The voice came again, interleaved with more static. There were voices in the background, someone having a coughing fit, a sudden whistle repeated a couple of times, as though the call was coming from a railway station.
‘I can’t hear you,’ she said again. It sounded vaguely as though someone was saying something like ‘Mineyore, mineyore,’ over and over again. After a moment, she realized that was exactly what it was.
‘I don’t know who you are,’ she said briskly, although she had a very good idea. ‘Or what you want. But sod off, will you, you miserable little dick?’ She slammed the receiver down as hard as she could, and went across the hall to Magnus’s study.
‘This is getting ridiculous,’ she said angrily. ‘It’s that man again, the stalker. I swear I saw him outside the restaurant where I was . . . entertaining a client to dinner tonight. And then the minute I enter the house, he phones me up with some drivel about me being his. It’s absolutely intolerable.’
‘You’ve had punters coming on to you before.’
‘Yes, but most of them take “no” for an answer, and if that doesn’t work, you use stronger language. This guy doesn’t seem to get the message that I don’t agree with his own estimate of himself as Mr Wonderful.’ She picked up Magnus’s cordless phone. ‘I’m calling the police.’
‘Can you be certain that it was this man on the phone?’ asked Magnus. ‘Could you swear that you recognized the voice? How could he possibly have got hold of your phone number?’
She stared angrily at him. ‘He could have followed you to the university. Asked someone who you were, how he could get in touch with you. Or asked bloody Peta – I know she gave him her phone number. It doesn’t matter: I know it was him. And how could he tell I’d only just got back? He must have been hanging around outside, waiting. How does he know where I live if he hasn’t been following me?’ Her knees trembled and she sat down hard on the nearest chair. ‘Look, this is beginning to really annoy me.’ And alarm her, though she wasn’t going to tell Magnus that; he’d probably try to impose a curfew, or lock her up in an impregnable tower, or something equally Victorian.
‘If you’re that sure it was him, why don’t you go and confront him, tell him to stop playing silly buggers?’
Her shoulders drooped. ‘That’s the trouble, isn’t it? As you say, I can’t prove anything, and all he has to do is deny it.’
‘Just ignore him – if it is him,’ Magnus said.
Jefferson
Nine
‘Mmm, yes, that would be fun.’
He had to laugh. It was that or weep. Or was it, ‘That would be fun . . .’ with an edge of sarcasm? It was a brush-off: perfectly civil, but he’d had enough of them in his time to recognize one when he saw it. And he hadn’t even told her what he really did, though from the look in her eye when he said accountancy, he wasn’t likely to get far enough to reveal the truth.
At least he would see her again, after the weekend. He thought about her conviction that someone was following her and wondered whether he should apply his powers of observation again, either give the guy a warning to lay off, together with a bloody nose, or find something more concrete for her to take to the police.
Looking about him, he wondered if he was growing out of the stark minimalism with which he had originally decorated the loft, beige linen (‘taupe, sir, if you don’t mind, not beige, the perfect complement to almost any room, nothing like a neutral background, sets all your conversation pieces off beautifully, know what I mean?’) not being compatible, judging by the homes of those of his friends who had children, with the raising of a family. When Jefferson queried the term ‘conversation piece’, the salesman had twittered a little and begun referring to clusters of willow-pattern dishes or hand-painted pottery jugs, which seemed odd to Jefferson who had never, as far as he could recall, had a conversation about hand-painted pottery jugs and if he had, wouldn’t have dreamed of purchasing two sofas to ‘set them off’. He sighed a little, thinking of the family who might one day soil those pristine ‘taupe’ covers, a contingency which although it had so far failed to materialize (first catch your family) nonetheless might eventually do so, were he only able to engage the attention of the ‘object of his affections’ (for part of Jefferson still clung to the dreams engendered by his grandmother’s library of romantic novels) if only he had one. Which reminded him that it was time the remains of Mary-Jane – not the remains, obviously, so much as the last items which linked him to what now seemed almost a Mills & Boon dream, despite its distinctly unMills & Boon ending – were finally disposed of.
What would Kate Fullerton have said if he had confided to her his youthful ambition to be a detective, or, for that matter (and more realistically) a policeman? When he’d informed his mother that he had decided to leave school to become a full-time police cadet, she’d thrown a teacup at him. ‘Are you crazy?’ she demanded.
‘Maybe.’ He nearly added that if anyone in the family was crazy, it wasn’t him, but being a kind person he refrained, reminding himself that maybe she had just cause. Or just Cause.
‘Police! Pshaw!’ She was given to such unidentifiable expressions of disapproval. ‘State instruments of repression! Racist, corrupt, stupid . . .’ She threw him a look in which he read her sudden realization that since he was, or might well become, all three of the latter he would therefore fit in very well.
‘It may sound like a cliché, Mother,’ he said, trying to sound both dignified and righteous and failing badly before her unwavering stare, ‘but I’d like to do my bit in some way or another, try to see that justice is done, the weak are protected, that sort of thing.’
‘The weak protected?’
‘Yes.’
‘Talk about the blind leading the blind . . .’
It had been more than adolescent idealism, but owing to an unfortunate tendency to feel nauseous at the sight of blood, he knew he could never be a doctor working in appalling conditions in far-off African states, or even closer at hand in the countries of the former Soviet Bloc. Nor did he think he had what it took to become a missionary, preaching the Bible to the heathen: he wasn’t at all sure that people did that any more, and not only did he have little belief in a benign Entity, he had never understood why missionaries were so insistent that if the heathen let Jesus into their hearts, they were from then on obliged to wrap themselves in cheap cotton, instead of remaining in the state of nature to which God and their habitat
had, presumably, called them.
Approached about the cadetship, his Headmaster told him he was making a gross error. ‘I shall keep your place for you, Andrewes,’ he said. ‘You’ll be back.’ His father agreed, phoning from rural Hampshire. ‘I don’t often find myself on the same side as your mother,’ he said, ‘but I have to say I think you’re making a bit of a cock-up.’
Even before he started his first day, he was fairly sure his father was right, and so it proved. Apart from the thick navy-blue woollen sweater, it was too macho for him, too all-male, too reminiscent of Haddon Hall, where if you weren’t good at rugby or at least cricket, you might as well slit your throat. There was no respect for intellectual achievement, and one evening after their supper, when he suggested a board-game (‘Anyone for chess?’), he was greeted by raucous laughter. He had longed to be rugged and manly, whatever that meant, craggy-jawed and steely-eyed, a real bloke – even the weediest of the other cadets seemed effortlessly to achieve these desirable qualities – but somehow, despite his size, it all seemed too difficult to pull off, especially as he didn’t swear easily, his jaw was rounded rather than craggy and however much he narrowed them in the mirror, his eyes remained quite incapable of steeliness.
After a few weeks, he resigned and returned to school, thanks to the benevolent string-pulling of the headmaster who was delighted to have him back. Eventually, he’d gained a scholarship to Oxford to study pure and applied maths. At university, he took up real tennis, seduced by the vocabulary (hazard, tambour, dedans, penthouse) as much as the mathematical calculations involved in judging where the ball would go, and fell in love again. For three years, he and Felicity wandered around the ancient city hand in hand, punted along the slow green river with a picnic basket and lay kissing among tall grasses in river meadows populated by dormice and larks. They were a couple, an item, their future fair and mapped out, until just before Finals when, at a party, she met a Rhodes Scholar from Pretoria, and that was that (‘It’s not you, Jeff, honestly, it’s me, I just don’t think we work, not any more.’). He’d tried to shrug off Felicity’s defection, but she had bruised his heart almost beyond repair, or so he often thought. Occasionally he wondered how she was faring, whether she and the Rhodes Scholar lived behind high walls topped with electrified barbed wire, whether she was kind to the black servants who ran her huge ranch-style house, what crop they farmed, whether he would ever see her again, whether he wanted to.
He’d ended up with a high-powered job at one of the merchant banks in London. He proved to be adept in whichever department they put him; people admired him for his skills and gradually his mother’s constant expression of regret whenever she looked at him, as though she’d been given the option to drown him at birth and had declined it, began to fade away. He’d learned the hard way that most women found the whole idea of accountancy a total turn-off. The remaining few nearly always started behaving like human calculators when he told them what he did. He could almost see them weighing up the chances in their heads: three to five years of boredom on the debit side, maybe a couple of kids, which would later be balanced out on the credit side, divorce = alimony + child support + half the house + lawyers’ fees + (if his earning capacity ran to it) any number of further expenses when the children got older. Yeah, they’d be prepared to take the risk.
Call me a cynic, he often told himself, opening the newspaper and immersing himself in the crossword or the Sudoku. I’d rather not have anyone than a woman like that. He’d read about them in the newspapers, women who did nothing at all except spend their husband’s money, didn’t cook or clean or look after the children or the husband, didn’t use their minds but spent their time going to nail clinics and hairdressers and gym clubs and so on. He could not have described exactly the kind of woman he wanted, but thanks to his grandmother’s library, when he met her, he would know her immediately.
As indeed had happened when he met Mary-Jane Callaghan. Mary-Jane, cute and tiny, barely five feet in her pop-socks, made him for the first time in his life feel all the things he’d wanted to feel: rugged and manly, a real bloke. After a year of going out together, they had married at the little church in Cornwall where her parents lived. She went on being cute and tiny, an adorable little creature who fluttered her eyes at him and touched him with small soft fingers. Their sex life was all he could ever have hoped for. He was, for the first time in his life, truly happy.
One night he came home to find her lying in the bath, eyes open, staring up at the ceiling, small breasts flat on her chest, the rest of her body submerged in a weasel-coloured mix of blood and water. She was quite cold to the touch: he estimated that she must have taken the Donormyl as soon as he left for work, then slipped off her rose-pink silk robe, which lay like an overblown flower on the bathroom floor, and climbed into the bath where she had slit her wrists.
Later he learned from her parents that she had tried to kill herself before, once at school, aged sixteen, and again at teacher training college. He wanted to know why no-one had told him, not given him the chance to take better care of her, but it seemed pointless to get angry with them, to add to their pain at the loss of their daughter.
Although he left a message on his mother’s answerphone, asking her to call him urgently, it was his father and Romilly who drove up to London from Hampshire and held him in a collective embrace, let him weep, cooked him scrambled eggs and baked beans on toast, all he felt able to get down.
‘It’s not your fault, son,’ his father said.
‘If I’d taken better care of her,’ Jefferson sobbed, ‘this wouldn’t have happened.’
‘Yes, it would,’ said his father. ‘Sooner or later, it would.’
‘There are always people who want to kill themselves,’ explained Romilly, the social worker. ‘And mostly they succeed. These preliminary stabs at suicide are nearly always botched attempts, rather than cries for help.’
‘You must not blame yourself, son.’
‘But I do.’
‘That’s the cruellest thing about suicide: all the people left behind who feel that they could have prevented it.’
‘In my experience,’ Romilly said, ‘and it’s admittedly fairly limited, thank goodness, there is something already dysfunctional about people who kill themselves. Afterwards, you think back and say, yes, that was always a little weird, or, I always wondered why he or she reacted like that.’
And in the weeks and months which followed, Jefferson began to reassess the short time he’d spent with his wife, and saw that possibly Romilly was right. This did not make him any the less devastated at the loss of Mary-Jane, but did help him to stop blaming himself, come to terms with her death, though he continued to harbour a strong feeling of resentment against her family.
He weighed up the pros and cons of staying on in the little house he’d bought for them both, a cottagey place in a cul-de-sac not far from Liverpool Street Station, which he had seen as a nest, a drey, a burrow in which she could curl up like an adorable kitten and watch him with her huge childlike eyes, and which now contained all that was left of her. The pros of staying on more or less matched the cons: keeping memories intact, preserving the remnants of his marriage, and so on, but in the end the bank took control and sent him up to a subsidiary branch (‘Just to get you away, Jeff, fresh woods and pastures new, we want you back a.s.a.p.’) which coincidentally happened to be in the same city where he had gone to school, though back then, thanks to school regulations, he’d seen little of it beyond the station and a couple of shops which made a living out of schoolboy pocket-money. He carried Mary-Jane (recently he’d been appalled to hear himself refer to her as Mary-Anne) with him and even now, in the big warehouse loft, he sometimes caught the ghost of her scent in the folds of a curtain or the softness of a cushion. He had intended eventually to return to London but in the event, found he enjoyed the somewhat slower tempo up here after the hectic pace of the capital, and without being aware of it, embedded himself in the city’s life, buying a
season ticket to the concert series at the town hall, becoming a Friend of the art gallery, joining a French conversation evening class and so on. After eighteen months, he had asked for a permanent transfer.
His life took an unexpected turn when one of the local partners had called him in for a ‘consultation’.
Pansy, his assistant, had relayed the news with a look of apprehension on her face. ‘I hope . . . oh God, they’re not going to send you back to London, are they, Jeff? Or make you redundant.’
‘I very much doubt it,’ he’d said cheerily, though for a fraction of a second his heart had plummeted into his expensive (non-crushed-leather) boots, before he reminded himself that good financial consultants were unlikely to be got rid of, and if they were, there was always work at the next big company. In fact, he’d occasionally thought of setting up on his own, sometime in the not-too-distant future, maybe taking Pansy with him – he was fairly sure she would come – and one or two others who had expressed a certain discontent with their working conditions.
This particular partner wasn’t one for beating about the bush, a trait upon which he often informed his colleagues that he prided himself.
‘Someone’s pulling a fast one,’ he said gruffly.
For a moment, Jefferson thought this was some recondite sporting term, the partner being one of those men who liked nothing better than wallowing in mud on the rugby ground or hitting balls across nets, or even speeding along rivers in small unstable craft. ‘A fast one?’ he said. A cricketing term, wasn’t it? He was fairly confident he’d heard Christopher Martin Jenkins (‘CMJ’) or someone similar use it on Test Match Special. Or was it something to do with motor racing?
‘Absolutely correct. Someone, in other words, is trying to pull the wool over our eyes.’
‘The wool?’ Jefferson had found in the past that a kind of vague echoing murmur was the best way to advance any conversation with Mr Pritchard until such time as he should choose to divulge what he was really trying to say.