by Tom Bradby
They reached the main road and stopped. He looked at her. ‘Come on, then. This is your place, you went to school here, make a suggestion.’
‘Beneath the abbey,’ she pointed, ‘there are some coffeehouses.’
They walked in the direction of the junction. An elderly white Volvo belched along and a pretty young woman in a T-shirt and tight jeans pushed her pram across the road past another group of boys sauntering up the hill in the direction of the school.
‘Why was Mrs Danes crying?’
Mac shrugged. ‘The memory of her husband.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘All in good time.’
Julia had led them through a narrow alley and past the sweetshop on the corner.
‘I meant to say thank you for your letters in Beijing … sorry I kind of stopped replying. Is your mother okay, Mac?’
It was a few paces before he replied. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not really.’
‘I thought it was in remission?’
‘It was.’
‘I’m sorry.’ She touched his arm just above the elbow, but he didn’t react.
‘There’s nothing anyone can do about it so there’s no point in being sorry.’
Julia wondered whether this was something he wanted to talk about and then why she had taken so long to ask herself that question.
‘The thing is,’ he went on, ‘people don’t necessarily respond well when they know they’re going to die.’
‘In what way?’
‘Well, it’s almost as if she wants to tie everything up before she goes.’
Julia did not understand. ‘To do with you?’
‘She never wanted me to be in the army, doesn’t like it and never has. She’d give anything to see me out and “happily” settled down … married.’
‘Why doesn’t she like …’
‘My father was …’ He looked at her. ‘My father was a noncommissioned officer, a corporal.’
‘I didn’t know your father was in the army.’
‘She hates anything to do with him. Whatever he did was wrong.’
Julia thought it odd that Mac’s mother didn’t derive pleasure from seeing her son as an officer when her husband had been in the ranks, but perhaps it was that the military gave father and son a potential link – a bond to which the mother had no access.
‘How is Judith?’
‘That’s a good question, to which I don’t know the answer.’
‘What happened?’
‘Well,’ he said. ‘Judith was …’
‘Pretty.’
‘Insecure.’
‘I thought she was nice.’
‘Exactly. Nice.’
He smiled, his big, broken nose pulled to the right. In this, he reminded her of her father. ‘What about Paul?’ he asked.
She smiled back at him. ‘Well … Paul.’ They were still walking. ‘I think I wasted three years of his life.’
‘I don’t suppose he considers it wasted.’
‘I bet he does. I hardly saw him.’
They crossed in front of the abbey and entered the first coffeehouse on the left. There was a bell on the door and it was dark inside. They took a table in the corner, the room empty but for a group of three boys from Cranbrooke and three girls. The boys had draped their sports jackets over the dark-coloured chairs and faced the girls, like an interview committee. There were occasional slightly exaggerated forced laughs.
Julia had her back to the room, facing Mac. He was smiling. ‘Once,’ he said, pointing to the group in the corner, ‘I suppose that was you.’
She turned round and looked at them.
‘Not often,’ she said. ‘I was painfully shy.’
‘But much in demand.’
‘Hardly.’
‘You? Bollocks. I don’t believe it.’ He leant back in his chair. ‘Still, if you think it was bad being you, you should have tried being me.’
‘And what was so traumatic about that?’
‘Oversized, gawky, uncomfortable. As attractive to women as Goebbels and Giant Haystacks rolled into one.’ He smiled at her. ‘Haystacks was a wrestler,’ he said, by way of explanation. ‘A fat one.’
‘I’m not that ignorant.’
There was another laugh from the other side of the room, then a young girl in a white pinny came over to take their orders. Julia asked for millionaire’s shortbread and tea, Mac just a cup of coffee.
‘Mind you,’ Mac said, when she’d gone, ‘we didn’t really have too many tea-shops in my bit of Leeds.’
He smiled again and Julia thought how attractive he was. He had a big face – big mouth, big nose, big tuft of sandy hair – and his smile brought it to life. It was a self-conscious gesture and she liked that about him, too. He was the opposite of smug, never quite at ease with himself.
‘You’re going to give me another lecture on privilege.’
‘Me, lecture you? Never.’
‘What did the sergeants say about me? Are they back from Beijing?’
‘Yes.’ Mac turned over his hands on the table-top and examined his palms. ‘And they said exactly what you’d expect. I got the impression they were fond of you, actually.’
Julia looked at the table, suddenly embarrassed by the way in which she had let people down. People she liked, who had trusted and admired her.
‘You seem almost indifferent.’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t really want to talk about it.’
‘I have to speak to you at some point,’ Mac said, quietly. ‘Officially, I mean.’
Julia was staring at her hands. ‘There’s nothing to say.’
‘If there’s nothing to say, then you’ve no defence.’
‘I don’t want a defence.’
The girl came over with a tray. They were silent while she unloaded it.
As soon as she’d gone, Mac leant forward once more. He had picked up his hat and was turning it in his hand, but he now let it fall to the floor beside him. ‘We could look for mitigating circumstances …’
‘Like pleading insanity?’
‘If you try to explain, I can help. They’ll be nervous about you – glamour girl, Sword of Honour, war-hero father and all of that.’
‘No, absolutely not.’
‘Hear me out.’
‘Mac. The answer is no.’ She looked at him. ‘You still haven’t said what you were doing seeing Mrs Danes.’
He leant back in his chair. ‘You’ll think it stupid.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, you know I studied history.’
She shrugged. ‘Yes.’
‘I was hoping to write a history of the Falklands War.’
Julia frowned heavily. ‘I think that’s been done a few times, Mac.’
Now he looked embarrassed. ‘Yes, I know. I just wanted something outside of the army.’
Julia felt chastened. ‘I’m sorry. It’s – it’s a good idea.’
Mac leant forward again and put his arms on the table. ‘I wondered, actually, if … ages ago, you showed me some of your scrapbooks – when I came down to stay after Sandhurst, and there was a leatherbound diary that somebody called … Was it Rouse? A friend of your father’s gave it to you.’
Julia hesitated. ‘Yes.’
‘Would it be possible to borrow it? Just for a day or two?’
Julia tried to think about this. ‘I suppose so.’
‘Thanks.’
‘But I’ll have to ask Adrian first. It’s a private journal, he might not … I mean, he said it was to give me a three-dimensional picture of my father in the last weeks, I don’t think it was meant for public consumption.’
‘It’s just for background, not quotation.’
‘I’ll still have to ask him.’ Julia began pouring her tea. ‘What did Danes have to say about the war, or have you not found him yet?’
‘Er…’ Mac cleared his throat. ‘Actually, Danes is dead. Shot himself. His best friend committed suicide as well, Richard Claverton.�
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Julia had a sudden, strong mental image of Danes with his balding head, stocky body and arrogant swagger. She remembered Claverton, too. They had both seemed such strong men and she was again shocked by how easily vital lives could be extinguished.
‘They both committed suicide?’
Mac hesitated. ‘I believe so.’
‘That seems very unlikely.’
Mac seemed on the point of saying something else, but instead he shrugged. Julia frowned at him heavily.
‘There was an inquest,’ he said.
‘Did your department look into it?’
‘Yes, I believe so.’
‘But they didn’t find anything amiss?’
‘No.’
‘Was it Rigby?’
‘Yes.’
‘I thought you said he couldn’t find his way out of a paper bag.’
Mac did not reply.
‘Why are you being evasive?’
Mac sighed. ‘I’m not. It’s just awkward … I’m trying to work out whether to bring it to anyone’s attention, but Rigby doesn’t respond well to criticism.’
When she got home, Julia did not invite Mac in while she went upstairs to get Adrian’s war diary, a little irritated that he had insisted on taking it today. ‘I couldn’t get hold of Adrian,’ she said, when she came back. ‘I’m not sure it feels right but I trust you, obviously, and if he says no quotations, you’ll respect that?’
Mac nodded. ‘Of course.’
Julia handed it to him and immediately regretted it. Mac leant forward, kissed her cheek, touching her upper arm easily, and got into his car. She bent down and looked at him through the open window. ‘What are you doing, Mac?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Aren’t you supposed to be working on my case? How come you’ve got time to be running around writing history books?’
‘Talking to you is all I’ve got left to do.’
‘Oh … right.’
She looked at him. Did he look duplicitous? She couldn’t tell. He seemed … suddenly shifty, somehow. She stepped back and watched him reverse out of the drive and, as he pulled slowly away down Woodpecker Lane, she felt a pervasive, inexplicable sense of unease and discomfort, as if an inability to trust Mac was the worst development of all. Professor Malcolm was right. Suspicion was like a disease. It ate away at you until you had nothing left.
She walked back into the house and, in the kitchen, found a note from her mother. It was bridge evening at the Rouses’ and there was another salad in the fridge. She would be back around ten thirty.
The light was fading, but there was plenty of this long summer’s day left and Julia decided she needed to get out and think. She found Aristotle lying in the larder, where it was cooler, and stimulated him into action, wishing, in a sudden emotional volte-face, that Mac hadn’t gone. He always disappeared when she would have been happy for him to linger.
As they walked down through the village, Julia passed the detritus of the media’s presence – crisp packets and a couple of white polystyrene cups – which she told herself she’d pick up on the way back.
She descended towards the common, Aristotle loping ahead. It was darker under the trees at this time of day, but the air was still warm.
Julia turned off the main path and walked up to the clearing at the top, standing on the edge of it. She thought that the photographs of Adrian fucking Sarah must have been taken from about this point, perhaps a bit further away, Simon Crick furtively hidden in the trees. Who had commissioned him? Had her own father been jealous of a new lover?
Julia sat against one of the tree stumps. She was in shadow here, but the clearing was still light, the sun spilling over the tops of the trees.
She found herself thinking of Pascoe. Surely it was not possible that he was still here, somewhere close, watching, as Professor Malcolm had suggested. It would be in his interests to get as far away from the village as possible.
When Julia looked up, she saw a figure standing in the middle of the clearing and, for a moment, her heart jumped as she thought it might have been Pascoe, but it was Alan and, as he saw her, he raised his hand and walked slowly through the long grass.
‘I saw Aristotle,’ he said.
‘The world’s most disloyal dog.’
‘Independent-minded.’
She stood up and brushed the twigs from her backside. ‘I guess they didn’t find anything with their search,’ she said. He shook his head. ‘At least that’s an end to it for ever.’
‘That’s what we said last time.’ He sighed, almost inaudibly. ‘It never ends. Shall we go and find Aristotle?’
She followed him out of the clearing, past the wizened tree stump, which was now out of the sun. They walked in silence, Julia slipping her arm into his and forcing his chubby cheeks into an easy, good-natured smile. Perhaps it was her imagination, but his eyebrows seemed to have grown bushier.
As they reached the main path, Alan asked whether she wanted to go the long way or the short way home and she chose the former. The next section of the path was muddy, then they reached drier ground as they began to climb a gentle incline. ‘Don’t you find it lonely living alone?’ Julia asked, without having intended to broach so intimate a subject.
‘No.’ He took a few paces. ‘Well, sometimes.’ He thought some more. They had almost reached the furthest point on the common. ‘In a way, that has been the one thing to come out of all of this. It has broken down the barriers that would normally exist in a community such as this so that I never feel alone.’
‘It must have been difficult today,’ she said.
‘Every day is difficult.’
‘I think about her every day, too.’
They walked a few more paces. ‘There’s always a gap,’ Alan went on, ‘not just for the person she was but the person she would have been.’
Julia understood exactly.
‘I think lost potential is almost the worst of it,’ he said. ‘To begin with, all I could think about was her vulnerability and my failure to be there to protect her when she needed me, but …’
The only sound was that of twigs cracking beneath their feet on the firm section of the path. They had turned towards home now. The path was wider here, the trees less dense. To their right, another track led diagonally down the slope to the edge of the common and, on this side, the view through the trees was out across a broader valley, one road climbing straight up the hill opposite then descending directly into Cranbrooke, another winding its way up to a junction further along, close to the regimental base.
A large tree trunk was set back from the path on the left and Julia remembered herself and Alice running along it, seeing how far they could jump into the long grass beyond.
‘As I get older,’ he went on, ‘I see you, others, doing so well. So pretty and bright and clever, and the worst of it is that I can’t visualize Alice as a young woman at all. The memories I have are old and I find myself staring into the void that is the space my Alice would have filled.’
Julia nodded and held his arm tighter, feeling that her life here was becoming schizophrenic, half on the outside of this community, half in the place she had always been. Alan seemed least aware of the awkwardness of this, or perhaps simply the most understanding.
They walked on in companionable silence. ‘I’ve come to feel,’ Julia said, ‘that we should not expect to get through life with nothing bad happening. It’s not realistic. You have to factor that in and—’
‘But many do.’ He looked at her. ‘Many sail through life with nothing amiss ever happening. So why did we get singled out? That’s what causes resentment. The injustice. That’s what we’ve both had to face.’
Julia nodded. She thought he meant this experience had been responsible for bringing them all together, but it was hard to think of anything good having come from it. Gently, she removed her arm from his.
When she got home, Julia ate the salad, drank a glass of wine and went to bed. She had not mad
e any attempt to contact Professor Malcolm, because she needed time to think. The white folder with the pictures of Adrian and Sarah was in the drawer in her bedside table, but the images it contained were still in her head.
The curtains were drawn, but moonlight spilled across her duvet.
Her right hand rested on her stomach.
She rubbed her feet together, thinking of the muscles tensing in Sarah’s thighs and buttocks and the way her face was distorted with pleasure.
Julia shut her eyes, thinking of the sardonic smile on Sarah’s lips.
She created space in the duvet and rubbed her hand gently to and fro on the smooth skin of her stomach, her fingers finding the waistband of her knickers then the soft hair within, her legs held tightly together. Two of her fingers edged down towards the gap, those beside them forcing her legs apart.
Julia heard the front door open and spun over on to her side.
After that she could not get to sleep, her mind trying to put into some kind of order the things she had found out that did not make any sense.
Sarah, whom Julia had always thought a disinterested mother, taken only with adult pursuits, had turned out to be interested in her daughter to the extent of grooming her. Sarah had taken Alice on modelling assignments, which no one knew about, with a photographer who had also, by coincidence – or not – been employed to creep around the local beauty spot taking surveillance pictures of Sarah being fucked by one of Alan’s friends and, at the time, regimental colleagues.
And yet Alan and Adrian, the husband and the lover, still appeared to be friends.
Julia could not imagine Adrian and Sarah having an affair, or guess at what on earth they would have found to talk about. If she had not seen the photographic evidence with her own eyes, she would not have believed it.
The moon was still bright and Julia sat up and pulled back the curtain to look out, feeling restless.
She got out of bed and sat at her desk, then moved out into the corridor and climbed up to the attic, itself bathed in light from the Velux window.
Julia pushed open the window and stuck her head out, the common ahead shrouded in a ghostly mist that encircled it closely, like a cap.
Alan’s house stood in darkness, but, as she turned her head further, she saw that there was a light on in Pascoe’s home in the lane beyond the pub.