by Glenn Cooper
“I think we’re good,” Christine said after a while.
“You sure you remember where he lived?” Molly asked.
“Not the address but the place. It doesn’t look so different. It was near where Peter Sellers was born. Wonder if Gareth’s still alive?”
They were in Southsea, only half a mile from the seaside. The morning air held seagulls and the promise of walks on the beach. Christine thought back on her days here, pushing a pram down to Clarence Pier and watching her toddler play with a bucket and spade while she sat on a towel curling her toes in the sand.
Passing the Sellers Coffee House Molly said she’d die for a coffee, setting the two of them into a refreshing spasm of giggles. They carried on, pounding the pavement until Christine satisfied herself that Nightingale Road was the right street.
Surveying the rows of tall, cream-colored terraced houses with bay windows, Molly said that it seemed awfully posh.
“It wasn’t his money,” Christine said. “It was his dad’s. He moved in with the old bastard after we split.”
“He might not be here any more.”
“If he’s still alive he’ll still be here provided he was left with enough inheritance to pay the rates.” She stopped and looked up and down at one of the row houses. “This is it.”
There were a few letters stuffed into the mail slot. She pulled them out. “Told you. This is Gareth’s house.”
“Come on then,” Molly urged. “I need to use the loo. Only advantage that Down has. You can go anywhere.”
Christine steeled herself. Gareth would be well into his seventies. Would she even recognize him? Would he recognize her? What would she say to him? How could she not have rehearsed what she’d say?
She forced her finger against the bell and waited. She rang again and heard a muffled “I’m coming,” and after a long pause the door opened and an elderly man, smaller than the man she remembered but with the same watery blue eyes and beakish nose stared at her for an exceedingly long time without speaking.
She felt compelled to break the silence. “Gareth. It is me.”
His dry lips moved. Nothing came out. Molly stepped out from behind Christine. She’d been friendly with Christine when Gareth was still her husband. She’d been the one who introduced her to Murph’s best mate, Colin Rix, and Gareth had hated her for it.
“Yeah, it’s me as well,” Molly said. “Couple of bad pennies, eh?”
The words finally came out. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”
“’Course you don’t,” Christine said. “Can we come in?”
“No!” he said, getting agitated. “I mean, I don’t understand. What’s happening to me? Have I died? Did I just die?”
“You’re not dead, Gareth. Calm yourself or you will be ill. Please let us in and we’ll explain everything. Nothing bad’s going to happen to you.”
He backed away from the door and let them in. The ordinariness of showing Molly where the bathroom was located seemed to settle his nerves. He and Christine waited in the hall without saying anything. When Molly emerged he led them to the lounge but Christine asked if they could go to the kitchen instead.
“I’ll make some tea,” she said. She almost laughed out loud at the simple statement. In Hell, making a cup of tea was like trying to fly by flapping your arms: impossible.
She remembered her father-in-law’s kitchen and when she went to the cupboard where the tea bags used to be kept, there they were, down to the same brand. Gareth steadied himself with a liver-spotted hand on a chair, watching her fill an electric kettle.
“Sit down, Gareth. It’s okay.”
“You’ve got biscuits, I hope,” Molly said.
He sat on a cane-backed chair and pointed to one of the cupboards. Molly came back to the table beaming and holding a pack of biscuits.
“Squashed fly. My favorite. This is going to be marvelous.”
Gareth could only stare while Christine served the tea. The two women gulped them down as if they were mugs of cold water on a hot day and Molly ate one biscuit after another, oohing and ahhing at the taste of each raisin.
Christine was pouring more hot water onto new tea bags when Gareth lost it.
He pounded the table with a clenched fist and shouted, “Who the hell are you?”
“You know who we are, Gareth,” Christine said.
“You died,” he croaked.
“We did,” she said gently. “We were murdered.”
“You got what you deserved,” he muttered before realizing the absurdity of the conversation and getting angry again. “Stop it! You’re imposters trying to pull a fast one on an old man. If you don’t leave I’m calling the police.”
“Gareth, you can ask me anything. Ask me something that no one else could ever know, no one but me.”
His pale blue eyes became watery. “Tell me what the last thing Christine ever said to me.”
The moment flooded into her mind and overwhelmed her with its vividness. She was certain she hadn’t thought about it for thirty years. The two of them were in their bedroom in London. She was throwing her clothes into a bag and he was sitting on the bed, crying. She had zippered the bag and lugged it off the bed, holding it the crooked way a small woman manages a heavy suitcase.
She spoke the exact words, “Tell Gavin his mummy will always love him,” then began to sob.
Gareth blinked at his own tears and in an instant, Molly joined in, until the three of them had wet faces.
“Christine,” he whispered. “How?”
“There’s more than just this world of ours, Gareth. The Bible was right. I don’t know if there’s a Heaven but I’m here to tell you, there is a Hell.”
Gareth was asleep in his chair. Molly had dozed off on the sofa. Christine was sleepy but she fought the urge, preferring to experience the evening as long as she could, for who knew when this world might disappear? She opened a cabinet and ran her fingers over Gareth’s mother’s tarnished silver and his father’s collection of Toby jugs. One of the faces reminded her ever so slightly of Jason’s and she pictured him sitting in their awful hut in Ockendon grieving over her disappearance. He’d be thinking the rovers got her. He’d remember her for a hundred years, maybe longer but would he remember her forever? She shook him from her mind, not because she didn’t miss him but because he had always told her since they arrived in Hell that if anything happened to him, she had to do whatever she needed to do to keep herself intact. You will not wind up in a rotting room, he’d say. You will stay whole. Far better to be a lord’s concubine than spend eternity in a rotting room. Now she found herself somewhere far different and far better than any scenario Jason might have imagined but the danger was no less acute. She still had to survive.
Towards the end of her long conversation with Gareth, he had asked her with a weariness which had reduced his voice to a sigh, what she intended to do.
“Do?” she had asked. “I want to feel safe. I want to sleep in a real bed. I want to eat a steak. I want a million cups of tea. I don’t want to go back there.”
“But where will you go? You can’t stay here.”
She had wished he hadn’t said that. She had wished he’d been able to forgive her for leaving him for another man, for abandoning her ten-year-old son to start another life with lusty and virile Jason Rix. But why should he? He was an old bitter man with curdled memories. It probably gave him some satisfaction that she had received the ultimate punishment for the life she chose.
She turned to the sideboard. She had seen there was a collection of framed photos. She hadn’t been ready to face them but now she set her jaw and drew closer. Her eyes darted from one photo of her son to another, taking in an entire disjointed childhood and manhood in mere seconds. Then all of a sudden, her handsome young man had a pretty woman by his side and then a baby boy and then, in the last photo she saw before turning away in joy and despair, a baby girl.
Gareth woke at the sound of her blowing her nose into a bathroom tissu
e.
“Where does Gavin live?” she asked.
“Portsmouth,” he said.
“I want to see him.”
Gareth had reluctantly, very reluctantly agreed. The wait was agonizing. Christine did her best to make herself presentable while Molly gobbled up everything sweet in the kitchen. When the doorbell finally rang Christine hurriedly applied a fresh coat of cologne and spritzed Molly as an afterthought.
From the sitting room she heard a man ask, “What was so important I had to drop everything, Dad? You’re not sick, are you?”
Gareth’s voice was stilted. “I’m not sick. There’s someone who wants to see you.”
“Who?”
“She’s in the lounge.”
A man with a close-cropped beard came in. The ten-year-old boy she remembered was there in the forty-year-old face looking back at her. He was a larger, more robust man than his dad, more like Christine’s own father.
He glanced at Molly on the sofa, her fingers frosted with powdered sugar, and said hello to Christine.
“I’m Gavin. You wanted to see me?”
She struggled with her composure. “Yes. I’m a friend of your dad’s. I wanted to meet his son.”
“Oh yeah? What’s your name?”
She hesitated too long to come up with, “Jane.”
Gavin sniffed the air, sending her heart racing. “Hello Jane. You ladies do like your perfume.”
Molly found that funny, cackled a few times, then shut up.
“How do you know dad then?”
“I used to live in the area.”
He seemed to study her face. “Did we ever meet?”
“When you were very young, Gavin. I’m sure you don’t remember.”
“I’ve got to say, you look familiar.”
Gareth sat on his chair and said emphatically, “You were too young.”
“If I was too young, how old was she? We look about the same age. How old are you, Jane, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“Older than I look.” She was desperate to change the subject. “Gareth, why don’t I put the kettle on?”
When she came back into the lounge with a tray, Gavin wasn’t there.
“Where’d he go?” she asked.
“He’s upstairs. I don’t know why,” Gareth said, working into a state. “I knew this was a terrible idea. You should leave. I’ll tell him you had to leave. I wish you hadn’t come. I’m confused by all of this. It’s not right. You shouldn’t have come.”
“It’s okay, Gareth,” she said. “I saw him. It was good. He looks a fine man. I’ll say goodbye and we’ll go.”
“I don’t want to go,” Molly said, slurping her tea.
There were heavy footsteps coming down the stairs and Gavin came back in. He was holding an old scrapbook open to a page of photographs.
He put the book in front of Christine’s face and said, “Tell me how it is that you look exactly like the mother who walked out on me when I was ten? Tell me that, Jane.”
18
Over a fortnight had passed since the decisive battles in the outskirts of Paris that had laid the table for the victory of the combined Italian and French forces over the armies of Brittania, Germania, and Russia. Skirmishes had continued on a daily basis but the great war had passed into history and no one in the know doubted that John Camp’s weapons were pivotal to the outcome. His percussion grenades had wreaked havoc among King Henry’s forces to the west of Paris and his La Hitte Cannon had pulverized the German and Russian armies to the east.
In the aftermath, Henry had limped back to Brittania in a controlled retreat, Barbarossa had decamped for his castle lair in Marksburg, and Stalin had followed him there for consultations. Francia was peaceful again.
The Italians remained in Paris, ostensibly guests of King Maximilien, though in truth he had not proffered a formal invitation. He complained daily to the Duke of Orleans and his principal minister, Guy Forneau that he would have preferred for King Giuseppe to depart for Rome.
“I don’t trust him, Forneau,” the king had said. “And he is only a soldier, a commoner who has no appreciation for what is required to be a monarch.”
Forneau had ground his teeth at the remark. Had Robespierre forgotten his own common blood? Who was he to disparage a man such as Giuseppe Garibaldi whose blood may have been common but whose heart was noble?
“Your Majesty will surely acknowledge that without the help of the Italians, Barbarossa would now be sitting on your throne. Besides, Garibaldi is recovering from his battle wound and cannot easily travel such great distances.”
“When he has sufficiently recovered, we will cordially see him off,” the king had said. “There is room in Francia for but one king.”
Robespierre’s palace was grand enough that the Italian party had their own wing far removed from Maximilien’s private chambers and halls. Forneau had rather short legs and an asthmatic constitution so the long walks shuttling between the two wings were taxing. On this night he arrived in Garibaldi’s room to find Maximilien’s physician attending to the Italian’s thigh wound. He was a twentieth-century doctor who had murdered a hospital administrator for having him struck off for attending to patients while drunk. In Hell, his love affair with the grape continued. Forneau smelled wine on his breath and hovered nearby to make sure that Garibaldi was receiving competent care.
“The wound is clean, quite clean,” the doctor told Garibaldi in their mutual tongue of English. “The time of danger has passed.”
He clumsily tried to re-wrap the bandage but Caravaggio elbowed him aside and re-did the job perfectly, completing it with an elegant bow.
“Good night, doctor,” the artist said with a derisive wave. “Don’t get lost on your way home.”
Forneau waited for the doctor to stumble off before saying anything. Antonio and Simon who were playing cards at a small table across the room, threw their hands down and joined the men at Garibaldi’s bedside.
“I believe you are healing despite this doctor’s efforts,” Forneau said.
Garibaldi smiled and swung his legs off the bed. “In my day, the nurses would say that God is watching over you. With neither God nor the physician to credit, I would say that I’m simply fortunate. How is Robespierre? I haven’t seen him in a good while.”
“He grows restless over your presence,” Forneau said.
“He’s not the only one who’s restless,” Simon grumbled. “What are we still doing here? If you ask me we should have followed the Ruskies and the Huns and finished them off.”
“I agree with him,” Antonio said, pleasing Simon no end. “We removed the hook and set the fish free. We should have eaten it.”
Garibaldi reached for the cane Caravaggio had carved for him and used it to hobble to a chair. “To extend Antonio’s analogy further,” he said, “I would say that if we had attempted to eat the fish, the bones would have lodged in our throats. We were fortunate to prevail but if we had extended our lines to make chase to Germania then we might have lost all we gained. This game of ours will be won by consolidation. Who would have imagined, only a month ago that we would have succeeded in toppling that monster, Cesare Borgia, and taking up peaceful residence in King Maximilien’s palace?”
“Yes, I agree,” Forneau nodded. “Francia is the next pearl in your necklace.”
“Our necklace, Guy,” Garibaldi said. “Well, we mocked the doctor well enough for drinking wine but now I would like some too.”
Simon poured and they pulled chairs into a circle.
“Now that you are out of danger,” Forneau said, “I believe we may proceed with the next step in our plan.”
“Do you think Orleans has the backbone?” Garibaldi asked.
“On his own, no. But with the assurance of my support, I believe so. Recall that he is the one who made the proposal to me. He wishes to wear the crown so badly I imagine he dreams of it and is disappointed in the morning when he finds his head unadorned.”
“Can we con
trol the events which will follow?” Antonio asked.
“Nothing is certain, but I believe so,” Forneau answered. “It would be far too dangerous for me to poll the nobles at court but I believe that they are no better disposed to Orleans than they are to the king. They chafe under cruel and capricious rule.”
“Orleans would be a tyrant too if he had the chance,” Caravaggio snapped.
“You are not wrong, my friend,” Forneau said. “Any of the nobles would, in time, become as bad a tyrant as Robespierre.”
“How do you know I won’t too?” Garibaldi said under his breath.
“Sorry, what?” Simon asked.
He repeated himself loudly.
“Because we know you,” Antonio responded, seemingly annoyed that their leader would doubt his own virtues.
“Don’t be so sure,” Garibaldi said. “You must be ever vigilant, even with me. If I become a tyrant I expect you good men to act, swiftly and surely.”
Simon got up to refill his glass and said lightly, “Well, I’m optimistic. You’ve been king for a month now, Giuseppe, and you haven’t fucked up yet.”
Forneau had a cryptic note sent to the Duke of Orleans and waited for a response. It came quickly with a single word written on a card delivered on a silver tray: Come. Forneau wondered why the ink was smudged.
When he arrived at the duke’s rooms, one of his retainers escorted Forneau inside. Orleans was soaking in a tub which explained the smudge. He squinted and called for his thick spectacles then stood, exposing his unimpressive manhood, before servants produced a towel and a robe. Orleans flopped onto a divan and dismissed all of his attendants.
“What is it you want?” Orleans asked, his long, wet hair dripping on the floorboards. “Your message was opaque.”
“It is not so much what I want, my good duke. It is what you desire.”
Orleans seemed to understand. “I see,” he said, his mood brightening. “Have you been reflecting on my proposal?”
“I have.”
“And what have you concluded?”