Transfixed, I watched my friends and colleagues caricatured by the television cameras, their mourning pallor accorded a sickly hue, contours flattened, their expressions and gestures theatrical, self-conscious. Jane, her hair twisted and stabbed by two silver pins, her black cheongsam high at the neck but split to the thigh, defying death to catch her. Suzette, her dancer's body wilting under the weight of sadness, twiglike limbs in black slacks, a black sweater, her small breasts rising and falling fast, like a frightened bird, her hair loose over her shoulders and halfway down her back. I had never seen her broken like this and I thought, grudgingly, that she must really have loved him. Maeve, uncomfortable, turning her head to speak to Jane in the pew behind, then turning back, her face unhappy. A chasm lay between us. I knew that I was, in the mind of each one of them, paired with Adam in death.
I had considered going to the funeral. I would have liked to bid Adam farewell in person, but my very presence would have been news, it would have turned a funeral into a circus. So instead I was a phantom at the feast, my place set, food untouched. I bade farewell from the comfort of the sofa, my face wet with tears, the children frustrated by my distraction. I had closed the curtains against the cameras of the press, waiting for me outside.
In the front row sat Harold, Norma, and David, the wife and mother in the middle, her hands reaching out to hold the hand of her husband on one side, her son on the other. Both were seated well away from her so that she had to stretch. I willed David to move closer to his mother, to smile at her, squeeze her hand, anything to comfort her. If only he would give her the affection she craved, surely she would not need my children. My children, the other phantoms at the feast.
The inadequate priest seemed haunted by the children, his homily falling repeatedly into traps of his own making. Clearly the man had given no thought to what he would say or to how it would sound.
“Adam made such contributions to all of us,” he said, his eyes blinking earnestly behind his spectacles, his voice strangely high-pitched. “He helped us understand the way the world works. He was in all ways a man of the world, a man who'd been round the block a few times and could tell us what was on the other side and make us want to go there. Adam's mother mourns him, his father mourns him.” He launched into a dolorous list of those left behind. “His brother mourns him and his friends and colleagues mourn him. We who are left behind, his family and friends, mourn the man who might have been, the father to his children … that is, the pillar of strength to a woman, a woman that is, who might have been his wife. A filial son, like the son he never knew … never had, in fact … in his parents' declining years.”
It was such a poorly worded send-off for a wordsmith that I couldn't help smiling. I saw signs of impatience on Maeve's face. If she'd been God she would have fired the man. Perhaps it was his ineptitude that stirred Norma and Harold to what came afterward. They emerged from the church but, instead of keeping on the designated path to the waiting limousines, Norma made a beeline for the press, galvanized suddenly to action. Harold chased after her, taken by surprise.
“I'd like to make a statement,” she said into the nearest microphone, her voice rushed and nervous. “Nobody's brave enough to say it, but I don't care about the consequences. We all know who killed my son. My grandchildren are in danger. I beg—” But at this point Harold reached her and grabbed her arm, yanking her back.
“Don't be a bloody fool, woman,” he snarled at her. He pushed her away from the press as her face crumpled, but the tapes still rolled, and they captured the curses he hissed at her.
They looked bad but I looked worse. The newspapers the next morning were united. IT'S THE WILL, STUPID, screamed one tabloid headline. The broadsheets just put it another way.
No one should be subjected to what Norma and Harold Wills have had to go through during the past week. They have lost a son and been refused access to his children. The cameras took us yesterday where we should not have gone, to the place where loss and anger meet, and it shocked us because it is an ugly place, where dignity is crushed. But push aside that shock, look with sympathy even on Harold Wills as he vents his distress on his wife, and who of us cannot say that anger is justified? Someone must pay for the loss of talent and humanity, and there must be no squeamishness about the sanctity of motherhood.
And so it was that I had to find David. I had not spoken to him since my split with Adam. The home phone number I had for him no longer worked, but a sympathetic mutual friend directed me to the Horniman Museum, where he had apparently been working for three months on a temporary project. I knew instinctively that the day after his brother's funeral he would be back at work, taking refuge. I had not telephoned to warn him of our arrival. I did not want to scare him off. As it was, I almost lost my nerve. Getting out of the house had been a nightmare, both children crying by the time I'd wrestled them through the horde outside. My escape route at the back of the house was still remarkably clear, I assumed because they were waiting for me to be arrested, and had calculated the police would have to park in front. With the virtue of hindsight I should have snuck out of the backdoor, but I hated to creep around like a criminal.
In the rain, the facade of the museum had a doleful look. The mosaic that decorates the frontage depicts a central figure, “Humanity in the House of Circumstance,” bordered on either side by the gates of life and death, the latter guarded by a somber-looking figure representing resignation. We struggled, stroller and all, up the steps.
Inside, a pretty teenage girl at the reception desk regarded me with awe.
“Why didn't you bring an umbrella?” she asked me.
“Can't hold an umbrella and push a stroller at the same time,” I answered, still breathless from the hill and the steps. “It's one of life's great truths.”
I pulled back the raincover, drenching the children as the rain ran off the plastic in rivulets onto their heads. They blinked and looked around expectantly.
“Can you tell me where to find David Wills?” I asked, approaching the desk and flashing a smile. “We wanted to surprise him.”
She stared at me, and my heart sank. There was nowhere, now, that I could go unrecognized. Even those who failed to read the newspaper every day had seen my picture on television. Surely, I thought, we looked sufficiently unthreatening. What was I going to do? Shake rain all over her? But the girl crumpled up her face in doubt.
“I'll just give him a ring then.”
“Please don't,” I started to say, but she was quicker than she looked, and she had already finished dialing.
“David,” she dragged out the second syllable of his name, tapping her fingernails on the desk. “I've got a lady by the name of Robin Ballantyne here with her children, and she says she wants to surprise you.” She turned her back to us then, and whispered into the phone. When she turned toward us and hung up, her eyes were even more anxious.
“Okay,” she said grudgingly, “you'll have to leave the stroller here.” She gave me directions, and I set off with one lead weight wriggling under each arm. Hannah was, at least technically, walking now, but we wouldn't get anywhere very fast.
I would have liked to linger. The children shrieked with excitement at the glass cabinets full of stuffed gorillas and emus, then stared in stunned awe at ten-foot-high tribal masks from Africa. Frederick John Horniman, nineteenth-century tea merchant and traveler, amassed such a large collection of artifacts and natural history specimens in his house that it is said his wife got thoroughly fed up.
David was waiting for us outside his office door. Shyer and slighter than Adam, with lighter coloring, he had frequently been written off (not least by his parents) as a pale imitation of his brother. His quiet scholarship had gone unnoticed and unpraised. If he felt bitter about it, he did not let it show. Now his face was worried, but as I approached I was relieved to see that his lips twitched in an involuntary smile of greeting.
“Robin, hello,” he said, then peered into Hannah's face and said softly, “M
y God, she's the spitting image. No wonder …” He let his sentence trail off and turned his scrutiny to William's face.
“Hello, little man,” he said softly. “Well, you're your mother's son.”
“David,” I blurted out, moved by his kindness. “I didn't kill Adam.”
He looked at me for a moment with the same careful attention he'd given the children.
“Come in,” he said.
Inside, his office could have been any academic's study, except for the presence, lying on a table in the center of the room, of an ancient Egyptian mummy in an unlidded crate, looking more like a cocoon than anything human, layers of yellowing cloth concealing the brutal interactions of time and flesh.
“I don't usually have a roommate. He's supposed to be going out on loan, but he got mislaid and ended up here.” He gazed down fondly at the body. “Actually I'm getting quite used to the company. He's been here all morning, and he's heard more about my family than I care to think.”
I released the children onto the floor and they scurried like insects under the table. David pointed me to the only chair, and I sat down while he perched against his desk, his bottom threatening to destabilize a leaning tower of books. He looked around for something to entertain the children with, and picked up an armful of academic magazines and put them on the floor.
“There,” he said, “they can shred them for me. Save me some energy.”
For a moment we watched as first William, then Hannah, got the idea, and within minutes the floor was awash with torn ethnographical treatises, footnotes scattered and bibliographies turned to confetti.
“My mother is not doing well,” he said. Then, with a sigh, “Nor is my father.”
“I understand all that,” I said impatiently. “I'm not unsympathetic, but they have to back off. How can I make them understand that I didn't kill their son? If only I could talk to them about what happened that night. There's evidence that the police aren't releasing …”
“It's really not a matter of evidence, is it?” David said mildly. “You tell me you didn't kill Adam and I am prepared to believe you, but that is all it amounts to: a balance of probabilities, and those very probabilities assessed according to my subjective view of who you are … The longer I'm a scientist, the more I realize there is no such thing as science. There is only what we choose to believe and the accumulation of whatever evidence we require to give it some validity. I choose to believe you didn't kill Adam, and because of that I'm prepared to do what I can to help you, but my parents choose to believe the opposite and will continue to do so until they have another name and another face that they can blame.”
I gazed down at the children. It would be torture for them to grow up in the world David painted, the children of a mother who might or might not be a murderer. I would not be able to expect them to defend me. If they chose to doubt me I could do nothing about it.
“How about a gesture of good faith?” I said eventually. “I won't try to convince them I didn't kill Adam, and they can visit the twins. I won't be there. They can go to my mother's house, and she will be there, and you will be there, and you will give me your word that you won't let them try anything silly.”
David thought for a moment, then shook his head.
“What's the point?” he asked.
“To buy me time. To defuse them a bit.”
David licked his lips.
“I don't really want to get involved,” he said, carefully avoiding my eyes.
David Wills, like Frederick John Horniman, was a great traveler. David's parents had not clung to him, nor he to them. They got on with their own lives.
“I'm stuck in the middle here,” he said. “I'm in a very difficult position—”
“Try my position,” I snapped.
He lifted his head and his eyes met mine. He heaved a sigh.
“I'll suggest it to them,” he said heavily. He returned to his perusal of the children and I watched his face. He was fascinated by them, and sad. His eyes kept returning to Hannah, so like her father.
“You must miss him,” I said.
He was unable to reply. He gulped convulsively.
“He was a good brother, wasn't he?” I am not sure why I needed to say this, but I had had so little chance to talk about Adam with someone else who had loved him. It was not as though I was going to wax nostalgic with Suzette about Adam her lover.
David sighed again and covered his mouth with his hand. His head jerked and his hand went to his eyes, where tears had sprung, removing his spectacles and rubbing. He shook his head, angry at himself, and after a moment he had recovered sufficiently to speak.
“He gave me his old laptop,” he said, his mouth still trembling. I frowned, not understanding the significance. Perhaps, in David's ivory tower, the gift of a laptop was the ultimate in brotherly love.
“He knew my laptop was broken and he wanted to upgrade.” David cleared his throat, then went on, “And I couldn't afford a new one, so I was glad to take it. He didn't wipe the disk clean or anything, just unplugged it and handed it over.”
I was beginning to see where David was headed.
“When Adam was killed I opened up some of the old files, but I can't make head or tail of it. There's so much stuff, and I don't know any of the people he refers to.”
“Have you shown it to the police?”
David shook his head wearily.
“Some of it's personal,” he said. “I couldn't bear to think of them reading it all in some police station somewhere. Besides, what's the point?”
“What's the point?” I echoed in exasperation. “It might tell us something about who killed him.”
David snorted.
“Does it matter?” he asked. “Adam's gone. A clue here, a clue there, how is some bungling bobby going to piece together anything that approximates to the truth? We'll never understand why it happened. Any attempt to re-create the past is doomed to failure, and anything partial is flawed.”
I stared at him. I had had enough of David's approach to the issue of guilt and innocence.
“Can I borrow the laptop?” I said eventually.
He nodded. Then he knelt down and started to play with the children.
Chapter 25
I plug the laptop in as soon as I reach home. I start to feel my way around. David was right. There is a huge amount of stuff here. What's more, there's no method, no order to it. In Word everything is shoved in under “My Documents”: letters to the bank manager, notes to the milkman, lengthy scripts for whole television series, even what appears to be an outline for a novel. I open it, knowing he would have hated me to see it. Set in Afghanistan it is a story of derring-do, of a dashing male journalist who journeys across war-torn desert and who must decide between the importance of his story and the safety of his source, a young and stunningly beautiful Afghan woman with ebony hair and silken skin. They have a lot of sex—some of it sounds familiar.
I go to Outlook, and type in the password David has given me. The screen is filled with an inbox of old e-mails. There is one from Maeve, full of praise for a one-off documentary on the Royal family. “You struck just the right note,” she writes, “no fawning, plenty of straight talking of course, but some genuine admiration. Our viewers are tired of too much cynicism, they like to switch off on an upbeat note. More of the same and your face will rarely be off the nation's television.” I scowl. Perhaps I don't want to go back to documentary-making after all. Perhaps I am too jaded.
A howl. Startled, I turn to look for the children. They have both left their posts in front of the television. I rush into the kitchen. Hannah has opened a cupboard and has pulled a heavy saucepan onto her foot. She isn't in pain, but is trying to extricate herself. I pick her up and put the pan back in the cupboard. As I walk back into the hallway, Hannah toddling behind me, I see that I have forgotten to close the gate and William is halfway up the stairs, his bottom swaying precariously, like a mountaineer on a narrow ridge. I rescue him, but the message
is clear. It is time to get out of the house, something that we achieve without harassment.
We headed for the fair. The children were too young for the big wheel (and I was too old), but they could watch. I dragged the stroller across ridges of mud, then across the gravel that had been spread over the car park that was the site of the fair for the week. We wandered aimlessly, gazing upward at flashing lights and feats of engineering, great crashing chunks of metal thrashing around in the air purposefully, as though pounding some vital component into shape. It was a freezing damp afternoon and there were few takers. One lonely man was on the Hammer, clinging to his seat belt, his face pale, more often upside down than right way up.
The sun made a brief appearance but at four, as if by clockwork, it seemed to extinguish itself. When Hannah started to cry I realized it was getting seriously cold. I turned the stroller homeward. We passed the ticket booth for the Hammer. A small group of kids was gathered there, taking possession of a handful of tickets. I paid no attention until I saw from the corner of my eye a sudden movement, a kick, foot hard into stomach, and then heard a sob. I stopped and watched.
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