by F. G. Cottam
Lillian stroked her sleeping son’s head on her lap and twisted his hair into silky ringlets between her fingers, wondering how Jack would react to exposure to his mother’s sexual betrayal of his father. He loved his dad. Both of the children did. James was a kind and attentive and generous father. He was generous in the way a child most valued in a parent: not with money to buy capricious gifts but with his time and his attention. She thought this sort of generosity not all that common in fathers simply because they were men. Men competed. Most competed to such an extent it left little time for anything else. James chose not to compete. He had all the time in the world for fatherhood.
Adulteress was an archaic word, seldom used. But it had a brute honesty about it she thought her son might find it hard to comprehend and difficult, once he did so, to forgive. James might forgive her. She thought that he probably would. The children never would. She had to think of a way of extricating herself from Robert without any of them finding out about her involvement.
James waited outside the school gate feeling slightly guilty. He nodded to a couple of familiar parental faces to whom he could not have put names or occupations. If all went according to plan, Olivia would be leaving St Paul’s at the start of the summer holidays for a new life in Cornwall. She would be leaving an excellent educational establishment when she did so. But it was one with which he had never properly engaged. He had never joined the school parents’ committee. He had never helped with the theatre programme they ran. He had never even helped out as a volunteer on a stall at the Christmas and summer fêtes held to raise funds for books for the school library or a new bicycle shed.
It was not that he was apathetic about his daughter’s education, he reflected. Both he and Lillian always attended the parents’ evenings and any theatrical production that Olivia was actually in. It was just that neither he nor his wife really had any appetite for community involvement. They were wrapped up in their own lives. They were rather insular as people and as a family.
Where he was concerned as an individual, James thought this probably an extension of the antipathy he had felt towards team sports in his own childhood. He had not been interested in football or rugby or cricket. He had been a strong swimmer and had represented the school and the county at crawl and freestyle. But swimming was an individual sport. You were isolated by your lane and you swam against the stopwatch, even in the relay events. He had never really understood the team ethos. Team spirit was something he had never experienced, let alone enjoyed. He was not by inclination a joiner-in.
He thought Lillian’s lack of interaction with Olivia’s school even more straightforward to explain. She was a loving and devoted mother but obliged to ration her time. Professional success meant a great deal to her both financially and in terms of her self-esteem. To sustain it, she naturally had to put in the hours.
The children were trailing out now across the playground from the single-storey main entrance in twos and threes. There was no sign of Olivia yet. This was unusual, he thought, looking at his watch, because she was characteristically out of school as soon as the bell sounded to maximise what leisure time she had between completing homework and eating dinner and going to bed. But it was not a cause for concern. Security at the school was vigilant.
He saw Olivia’s form mistress, Mrs Chale, scanning the waiting parents beyond the gate and railings, looking, he realised with surprise, for him. She spotted him and came striding over and gestured for him to breach the normal protocol and enter the school grounds through the gate.
‘Is anything the matter?’ It was a stupid question. Of course something was the matter.
‘Olivia is absolutely fine,’ she said, ‘there’s no problem whatsoever. She is with her class teacher Miss Davenport and we can collect her together in a moment. But there is something Jenny Davenport thinks that you should look at first. And I agree with her.’
Mrs Chale led him along a corridor. They passed the music and pottery rooms. The corridor was lined with shelves and display cases. Papier-mâché and pottery constructions were bright and gaudy tribute to the industry of the kids being educated by the school. They came to the art room. Sunshine slanted through the bank of windows on its west-facing wall. Paint had dried vividly in recent splashes on the parquet floor. The teacher walked to the desk at the front of the room and picked up a folder from it and slipped out a sheet of cartridge paper on which something had been painted.
‘Olivia finished this about forty-five minutes ago.’
It was a seascape. The water was turquoise and eerily calm. Olivia had inherited her mother’s ability to paint and draw and what James held between his hands did not look like the work of a girl of eight. At the centre of the painting, a rock rose from the still water. The height of the tide made it semicircular in shape and gulls wheeled in the empty sky above it, giving it scale against the picture’s general emptiness.
Reaching out of the water, against the rock, a pair of human arms was visible from just below the elbow. They were bare. And they were not really reaching, were they, James acknowledged in his mind. They hung, because they bore the weight of a body submerged beneath the water and because the hands from which they extended had been hammered through their palms to the rock by two great and bloodied iron spikes.
‘Our principal concern was to make sure that none of the other children should see it,’ Mrs Chale said. ‘It would distress a child.’
‘Did they?’
‘No.’
‘It would distress an adult,’ James said.
‘I’m sorry to have to confront you with it in this way.’
‘Has she ever done anything like this before?’
‘That was the question I was about to ask you. Has she?’
‘Never,’ James said. ‘I mean, she paints and draws all the time. Her mother is an illustrator.’
‘I know. We have any number of examples of her mother’s work in our library. None of it looks like this. I used to teach Jack, when he was a pupil here in year five. He would be what, thirteen now?’
‘Jack’s internet and games access is carefully monitored, Mrs Chale. I can assure you he has not exposed his sister to anything that looks like this.’
Mrs Chale took the picture from his hands and put it back in the folder and gave the folder to him. ‘This is something you might wish to address,’ she said. ‘I don’t really expect any repetition, because Olivia is a sweet-natured and intelligent child and not generally given, in our experience, to producing dark or violent images. Perhaps she was merely illustrating a nightmare.’
James nodded.
‘If there is any repetition, it will become a matter of pastoral concern,’ Mrs Chale said.
James looked her in the eye. ‘There won’t be any repetition,’ he said. ‘I’ll address it with her. Her mother and I will talk to her.’
‘Thank you.’
She took him to pick up his daughter. Olivia sat at her desk, her satchel and lunchbox clutched impatiently on her lap between both hands, her legs swinging under the chair because they were not yet long enough to reach the ground. She wore black leather T-bar sandals over white ankle socks. She wore the striped pinafore and purple cardigan and straw boater of her summer uniform. Her face broke into a broad grin when she saw her dad. She slid from the chair and ran to him.
He did not mention the painting to Olivia on the way home. He knew, or thought he knew, what had inspired it. Both of his children had picked up on his discoveries about Brodmaw Bay the way someone tuning a radio might be surprised by a strong and totally unexpected signal. Jack had heard a phrase James had read but never consciously uttered. Olivia had painted something he had pictured just for a moment in his mind.
The gruesome image must have entered his daughter’s head more or less at the moment he was reading about the atrocities carried out in the name of Cromwellian justice by the mad witchfinder Jacob Ratch.
‘What lessons did you have this afternoon, darling?’
&n
bsp; ‘We have double art after lunch on Monday.’
‘What did you paint?’
She walked silently along the pavement beside him, her hand in his. ‘It couldn’t have been very good, Daddy,’ she said, ‘because I can’t even remember what it was.’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said.
They came to a junction with a newsagent’s shop on one corner. A gang of hoodies on mountain and BMX bikes loitered outside, one with an American bulldog or pit bull at his feet. The dog was not on a lead. Of course it wasn’t, its job was to intimidate. Its owner probably didn’t even possess a lead.
James thought the boys probably about fourteen years old. They should have been at school. But what truant officer would have the nerve to approach them? A Metropolitan Police patrol car was parked on the kerb on the other side of the road from the hoodies. They were monitoring, he supposed, racking up their salaries safe behind the locked doors of their vehicle in their stab vests with their cans of pepper spray and their radios to call for back-up if things got out of hand.
Maybe the hoodies had drugs to trade. Almost certainly they had knives. But the dog was a useful deterrent and the libertarian pressure groups had anyway made stop-and-search something officers like the ones in the car had to justify with reams of time-consuming paperwork. The pit bull indulged a growl, from low in its chest, as he passed by the boys with his daughter. One of them hawked and spat on the pavement, very deliberately.
Three blocks from the school, James took the folder tucked under his arm and tore it and its contents into four and put the pieces in a street litter bin. Olivia did not even ask him what it was he was discarding. He was confident she would not produce so ghoulish an image again. He had done his reading on Brodmaw’s sometimes sinister past. He would not dwell on it. The future was the subject occupying his mind and it was bright and optimistic and did not involve dabbling in magic and the bloody retribution doing so had summoned in past centuries.
He was much more troubled by Jack’s scarecrow dream. This was because the thing he had seen lurking at the rear of the garden had somehow inspired it. And the thing he had seen had seemed not just real but malevolent. Was it really safe to travel hundreds of miles to the remote west of England, leaving his family undefended, after seeing that?
He forced himself to think about it rationally. He had gone outside to confront the apparition, gripping his vigilante blade. And there had been nothing there. He had looked for physical evidence and found none. Beyond a vague odour, there had been nothing suspicious in the garden at all. Yet if someone had come or gone back over the wall, there would have been wet footprints. If someone had really crouched in the shrubs, there would have been bruised grass and trampled flowers and their fallen petals.
There had been no physical sign of intrusion because he had imagined it. His lurid reading about Celtic pagan myth and ancient ritual in Cornwall had provoked his imagination into seeing something fanciful. Lillian was far less suggestible to such nonsense than he was. She would keep the back door securely locked, as she always did. The security light would be operating and the alarm would be switched on. At the first hint of any danger to their little urban fortress, she would dial 999. She was a sensible woman. She already had the number of the local nick on speed dial on her mobile.
Later that evening, he did mention the picture Olivia had painted to his wife. He had promised her teacher he would and he endeavoured to keep his promises. He did so because he valued the trust between them. He knew that when his dissatisfaction with his own achievements and character made him low, he could be uncommunicative and sometimes even remote. But he thought of Lillian as his best friend and would never have lied to or deceived her.
‘I wish you had kept it.’
‘It was not a pretty sight.’
‘What do you think provoked it?’
James told her. When he had done so he said, ‘Do you think that far-fetched?’
She was silent for a long moment. Then she said, ‘It’s all relative. In isolated terms, yes, it is far-fetched. But neither of us much believes in coincidence.’
‘No.’
‘She is not of a morbid or ghoulish disposition.’
‘No.’
‘And it is not so far-fetched as my illustrating an entire children’s story book and eighteen years later having not the slightest recollection of having done so.’
‘Have you given any more thought to that?’
‘Jack was still in the middle of his afternoon nap when you went to fetch Olivia. So I took the opportunity to go up into the loft and look at my old diary for 1992. There is a six-week blank. I was very punctilious in those days about keeping my diary. But from the beginning of April until the middle of May of that year, I did not write a single entry.’
James thought about this. Lillian’s father had died five years earlier. If she had endured some kind of breakdown in the blank period, he would have been the best person to ask about the specifics. Her mother was alive and physically robust. But she was gripped by dementia. She remembered her daughter’s young childhood with perfect clarity. But the Lillian of early adulthood was someone she was now only able to recall vaguely. ‘Do you think it sinister?’ he said.
Lillian shook her head. ‘No, I don’t. The only sinister aspect to it is that picture of the ruined church I painted. I can’t imagine why I included something as sombre as that image in a book clearly intended for children of a fairly young age. The fact that I can’t remember doing it isn’t sinister. It’s just bloody odd and slightly infuriating. You’d think I’d at least remember getting the fee, banking the cheque.’
‘Maybe you were told to include the image of the church. Maybe it was one of the stipulations when you were offered the commission.’
‘Maybe it was. But I wish I could remember whether it was or it wasn’t. Not to mention who it was did the commissioning.’
James pondered for a moment on the blank diary period. Four of the six weeks would have been Easter vacation, plenty of time for Lillian to have travelled to Cornwall to paint her vistas from life. Two of those weeks would have been term-time though and her old tutors were very much alive. He concluded in his mind that if she had been behaving oddly, they would certainly have noticed. And they would remember. Was it worth pursuing? After eighteen years, it was not a mystery in urgent need of solving.
‘It might all come back to you while I’m away,’ he said.
‘What time will you leave?’
‘I’ll leave as soon as it gets light.’
‘How long will you stay?’
‘I’ll come back on Friday. Two full days should be enough to decide whether it’s a fit place for us to live.’
‘Are you excited?’
‘Yes. It’s exciting, don’t you think?’
‘I do,’ Lillian said.
James got out of bed quietly the following morning, able to do so without waking Lillian. She slept on and for a moment he stood by the bed and looked at her, just for the pleasure of being able to do so. It was a privilege, he thought, as much as it was a pleasure. He had never been guilty of the marital crime of taking his lovely wife for granted.
Once he was beyond London, he relaxed and allowed himself to think about the implications of the trip. His being at the wheel of the car on the way to his planned destination was a consequence of his own decisiveness. The assault on Jack had been more than just a catalyst. But he was the one insisting the event required a fundamental shift in how and where they lived their lives. He could not remember having been so decisive in years. Planning and taking action had brought changes to his mentality and mood. He felt confident, buoyant with optimism and exhilarated.
Brodmaw might be the heaven he hoped for and it might not. But if Brodmaw didn’t fit the bill, somewhere else would. And James would make it his mission to find that place. He was determined on the change. He was intent on finding somewhere his family would be safe and happy; somewhere their relative prosperity
and willingness to live honourably and with integrity would be rewarded with a better quality of life.
James thought that his real professional talent was not for Steve Jobs-type software innovation, but for creating computer games. He had almost completed a game of his invention he still thought could be a global hit if he ironed out its remaining glitches. He had set it to one side shortly after Jack’s birth, when Lillian had not been earning, time had been short and economic necessity had quite reasonably prevailed.
In the decade-plus since then, computer memory, software and graphics cards had improved beyond all measure. The technology had caught up with his original games concept. He thought that if he invested between three and six months to fine-tune what he already had, he could sell his game as a complete package. It would easily adapt to the most popular desktop platforms. A hand-held version was also feasible.
Best of all, his game had the sort of architecture, time-frame, density of plot and appealing central characters that had Hollywood film studios thinking franchise. He was almost forty. He was neither delusional, nor in the grip of a midlife crisis. It was just that the second chapter of his professional life could hold the promise of vastly more fulfilment and reward than the first chapter had. He felt that the family’s relocation could give him the impetus to realise that promise.
He could imagine presenting his game to the CEO of a major industry name. He could imagine doing it before a sceptical board of directors. He would present with confidence and panache. He believed that his game was a winner.
He would not be troubled by the anxiety that had sometimes hampered his past efforts at public speaking. He would not need the diversionary tricks the hypnotherapist had taught him. There would be no nerves to conquer. His ordeal of waiting in the hospital for his son to return intact to consciousness had cured him of anxiety. More accurately, the experience had been a harsh lesson in teaching him just when anxiety was actually justified.