by Rebecca Wait
Malcolm had gone to see the fiscal in person over in Oban, and the man had taken him through the findings, answering all his questions. He had been very kind. Malcolm went home on the ferry, still clutching his letter, still having learned nothing new. But why would the police or the fiscal have been able to unearth the truth about his brother when Malcolm himself could not? He had put the letter away in the bottom drawer of his desk and never looked at it again. “Why keep it at all?” Heather had said, and Malcolm hadn’t had an answer for her except that he felt he had to.
There was one thing he came back to from time to time. It was a conversation he’d had with Katrina’s sister Jill after the funeral for Katrina, Nicky and Beth. They’d all gathered in Malcolm and Heather’s cottage for the wake, though the place had been much too small really; people had spilled out into the garden, but thankfully the rain held off. Malcolm found himself standing in the narrow hallway with Jill, who looked as exhausted by the day’s events as he was. She was rather difficult to talk to, a reserved woman, not unlike Katrina in that respect, but without the warmth that softened Katrina’s shyness. After some awkward small talk about the turnout, Jill had said abruptly, “You know, she rang me, a few weeks ago. Hadn’t heard from her for two years by then.”
Malcolm had nodded. He knew that people always regretted not having spent enough time with the dead person before they passed; he had felt this briefly about his own father, and he’d hated the man.
“She asked if she and the children could come and stay for a while,” Jill went on. “A holiday, she said. I was about to tell her there wasn’t room. We weren’t close anymore. But there was something in her voice.”
This was the part that had stayed with Malcolm over the years: something in her voice.
It probably meant nothing. People invented all kinds of things to torment themselves after a death. Katrina didn’t seem to have pursued the idea, anyway. The next Jill had heard of her sister was a distraught phone call from Heather several weeks later, and then the lurid media reports. (Malcolm and Heather had kept Tommy away from all that, at least. That was one thing they had done right.)
“You never spoke to Heather like that,” Tommy said now, breaking into his thoughts. “The way my father spoke to my mother. Unkindly, I mean.”
“No.” God, he hoped not.
“So why did my father treat his wife like that and you didn’t?”
“We weren’t the same person,” Malcolm said, hearing how defensive he sounded.
“I just don’t understand,” Tommy said, “how he ended up one way and you ended up another. He can’t have been born bad. Can he?”
Malcolm shook his head. “I don’t know.” It wasn’t as though he hadn’t thought about it. It didn’t sound likely, though. Babies were babies, weren’t they? Children were children.
“What was your father like?” Tommy said.
Malcolm sighed. He thought carefully and said, “He was unhappy. He didn’t like our mother, and I’m not sure he liked us much either. Me and John.” He hesitated. “He was a bit of a bastard, truth be told.”
Tommy said, “So you see, then. It gets passed on.”
“Aye, maybe.”
Malcolm caught Tommy’s stricken expression for just a moment before Tommy could hide it, and realized, belatedly, what his nephew had been attempting to ask him. Why was he so slow today? Trying to match Tommy’s indirectness with his own, he said, “I don’t believe I am like my father. That’s not always the way it goes. I don’t believe we’re doomed to become our parents.”
“No?”
“It’s not genetic,” Malcolm said, “the kind of –” he paused, searching for a suitably vague word—“attitude your father had, the attitude my father had. Maybe you learn it. Maybe John learned it. But it isn’t inevitable.”
Tommy didn’t speak for a few moments. Then he shrugged, and drained his mug. “Yeah, maybe. Anyway, I think I’ll go up.” He produced what might have been an attempt at a smile. “All that chamomile. Making me tired.”
“O.K.,” Malcolm said. To fill the slight pause that followed, he added, “Sleep well. I’ll be out with Robert in the morning, but back in the afternoon.”
“Right. Night, Malcolm.”
Then Tommy was gone from the kitchen and Malcolm breathed out slowly.
When it came to John, Malcolm could see as well as Tommy that the bare facts of the matter didn’t add up to much. Their father had been hard on them. Their mother had favoured Malcolm. Neither explained why John would take it into his head to murder his wife and children.
Of course, Malcolm knew it would be easy to claim now, to let himself think now, that he and John had never been close, that he had never really known his brother. It wouldn’t be true. Or at least, it would be both true and not true, which seemed to Malcolm to be the case with so many things, especially as he grew older.
He and John had played together as young children. They had always been together. As teenagers, they had begun to go their separate ways, even while they lived in the same house and worked side by side on the croft, but as young boys they had been comrades. They had roamed across the cliffs and the beaches together, just as Tommy and Nicky had done. They climbed over the rocks in the north to watch the seals and in summer they swam in the sea, playing football on the beach to dry off. When they helped their father, it would usually be together too, feeding the sheep or getting them down from the common grazing and, when they were older and stronger, cutting the peat and helping with lambing. They were united in this, the hard work and the shocking cold of the early mornings, trying to warm your hands and shield your face from the wind as the sun came up over the cliffs and turned the machair gold.
Most of Malcolm’s memories were outside, and when he pictured himself as a teenager, holding a sheep while his father sheared it or battling the wind on the hillside or driving the harvester across the low-lying fields, he always saw John there too, even if he knew he’d more likely been alone at the time.
And John had disliked the croft. Had he always, or had this come later? Malcolm thought John had wanted different things even as a child. He had a memory of his brother and the satchel, a leather school satchel John had been desperate for and had finally received one Christmas. Malcolm wasn’t sure how old his brother had been then—perhaps seven or eight? He remembered the satchel because he had found it so incomprehensible at the time, how passionately John had his heart set on it, when neither of them had any use for a smart leather book-bag like that; they had very little to carry to school, and their old rucksacks did the job fine. Malcolm couldn’t get his head around craving something that had no real use. Maybe he had teased John about it. He felt certain his father had, saying something like, “You’ll be carrying the feed in that, will you?”
But Malcolm recalled John’s excitement when he’d opened the satchel that Christmas, how John had leapt up to hug his mother and she had laughed and hugged him back, and Malcolm had felt pleased to see this, and surprised. John had carried the satchel about with him everywhere for a time, Malcolm recalled, and it had looked funny with his old thick jersey with holes in the elbows and his muddy boots.
Then later, another memory: he and John coming into the kitchen when their mother had a friend round (he could not remember who it had been), and the woman saying, “That’s a smart satchel, John. What have you got in there?”
Then, before John could answer, their mother saying, “Oh, it’s empty. He has nothing in there at all. He just carries it around for show.”
She’d said it lightly, with a laugh in her voice, and Malcolm was sure she hadn’t meant to be cruel. But he had felt his brother’s humiliation. He didn’t know if he was misremembering, but he thought John had stopped carrying the satchel around after that.
Malcolm could see it was silly to dwell on something like this. In any case, he knew as well as anyone what a stra
nge darkness the past was, how we plucked pieces from it and refitted them to our own purposes. The past was a story we told ourselves.
“We could move, you know,” Heather had said to him in the months after it happened. “Take Tommy away and take ourselves away too. Go somewhere where nobody knows us.”
This was in the days when Malcolm was most painfully aware of the questions people were asking themselves. Did violence run in families? Did whatever rage had been in John live on in his son, and maybe even in Malcolm?
Whatever people were thinking, Malcolm had always known it would be impossible for them to move. He thought Heather knew it too. When he had told her, “This is our home,” she hadn’t pursued the subject further.
But they should have taken Tommy and run, Malcolm thought now, sitting alone in his kitchen with his cooling chamomile tea. He had been selfish to insist they stay, even after it became clear that Tommy would never cope on the island. Malcolm had talked of the croft, and of the house, and of their roots, and Heather hadn’t argued. But those hadn’t been the real reasons, and he wondered if Heather had known this too.
She had believed it would be better for them to go somewhere new, where they wouldn’t always be known as the family of the man who murdered his wife and children. But the idea had terrified Malcolm. Away from the island, away from its tethers, he would know, he would know he was the brother of the man who killed his family, and what else was there but that once he was off the island? Here, everyone knew him well, and everyone had known him long before it happened. However much they might talk about him behind his back, however much they might have to say about the killings, he would always be Malcolm to them, and Heather would be Heather, and they worked a croft to the west of the island, and they had always belonged here. Malcolm desperately needed the islanders to give him a context beyond his brother’s crimes, because he no longer believed he could do that for himself. Off the island, he would exist only in the orbit of the murders. So this was the selfishness he had never admitted to, not even to Heather; even after it became clear Tommy could not stay here, Malcolm could never have contemplated leaving, because however afraid he had been for Tommy, he had always been more afraid for himself.
I’m sorry, he wanted to say to Tommy now. I let you down.
And in how many ways? He had failed to protect him before—and Nicky, and Beth—and he had failed to protect him afterwards. On both charges, there were arguments he could make that would sound convincing to others. He could defend himself if he cared to. But he did not care to.
14
Tom lay upstairs in bed, as usual not sleeping. The agitation seemed worse tonight, and he couldn’t say why except that his father felt close at hand. But it was not as though he was ever far away. He had come with Tom to Nottingham where he’d lived with Jill, to Manchester, to Edinburgh, to Lisbon, followed him to London, had finally taken up residence in the flat Tom shared with Caroline. Tom had hoped for a while that Caroline might be the one to chase him away, though in the end he realized that was too much to ask of anyone.
He had met Caroline when he was at a particularly low ebb, but this was something he’d never told her; it wasn’t right to make someone feel you were dependent on them, that you needed them more than was really acceptable. He sometimes wondered why she was with him—she was amazing, she could have been with anyone—but he wasn’t sure he understood relationships anyway. Why was anyone ever with anybody else? She had said she enjoyed his company. She said she loved him. They had been happy together for a while.
But of course, he was still his father’s son.
“You were very quiet this evening,” Caroline had told him a few months ago. They were walking to the Tube after dinner with friends, and Tom had not been in a good mood. He had felt, obscurely, that it was her fault.
He had said, “Didn’t have much choice, did I? You wouldn’t let anyone get a word in edgeways.”
He had seen the shock on her face and then the hurt, and had felt briefly pleased to have wounded her, while observing himself feeling this. Hating himself.
He remembered how his father had commented on his mother’s clothes, sending her back upstairs to change before church. He had said the colours were too bright, or that her outfit was ugly (or even “frumpy’, that silly word Tommy and Nicky had laughed about afterwards, because they thought it sounded like a pudding). Tommy had felt angry at the time on his mother’s behalf, but he had known too that it was her fault for not dressing the right way. She made things difficult when she didn’t need to. And Tommy had thought all fathers were like this, that behind closed doors this was how all men treated their wives.
As an adult, Tom had had to train himself to blame his father, not his mother. He considered himself enlightened now. He had worked hard and had learned to challenge every automatic thought he had. Still, though. Still. His father’s views lurked somewhere within him, coiled up in his guts like a tapeworm. It was his father’s voice Tom heard when he told Caroline she talked too much.
Later that night, back in their flat, he had said, “Sorry. I’m sorry, I don’t know why I said that. It wasn’t true.”
“You said it to upset me,” Caroline replied.
“Yes. I’m sorry.”
She’d forgiven him the next day, because she trusted him, even though she shouldn’t (did he blame her for that, too?). Part of Tom had watched the whole scene play out from a distance, observing his own remorse—which was genuine—while wondering when the next time would be.
And there was always a next time. Tom would grow cold, would become withdrawn, would snap at Caroline over nothing. Would be critical of her when she was eating too loudly, or scattering crumbs over the carpet, leaving all her make-up out in the bathroom, or her clothes on the floor. She had been messy; that much was true. Mostly he managed to keep these criticisms to himself, silent, savage ripples that he felt in his chest as he watched her. Sometimes they would escape in a sharp remark that he would later regret. It was one thing to be like his father, another thing to let everyone know it.
Caroline was usually patient with him when he was like this, when the depression came and everything around him seemed to constrict and darken. Perhaps he resented her even more for that, because in her quiet watchfulness during these times she reminded him of his mother.
He’d gone through Caroline’s phone once while she was out on a run, convinced (for no reason that made sense) that she was cheating on him, panic bursting in his chest as he scrolled through her texts. He’d found nothing, of course, beyond some messages to a colleague that were slightly too friendly in tone—but that was Caroline’s tone with everyone. Anyway, that wasn’t the point, Tom thought afterwards. The point was that he’d done it. He never mentioned it to Caroline.
But he grew resentful if she stayed out late at work drinks, or even if she didn’t stay out late; even if she went at all. He would be there, the man she’d been messaging, and if not him, then someone else. But Caroline worked in publishing; she needed to go to these drinks things. Tom allowed her to go (yes, allowed her, he heard it too), then punished her with his distance when she came home. When this happened, she might cry or she might react with anger of her own. Always, when the blackness had lifted the next day, Tom would feel ashamed. But he’d known exactly what he was doing at the time, and he knew he’d do it again.
He had been amazed, over and over, that she did not leave him. Of course, he was not monstrous all the time, or even most of the time. They laughed a lot together. But it was always there. He was terrified of her leaving him, while judging her harshly for not doing it. It was a strange form of cognitive dissonance, being able to recognize his father’s attitudes as hideous while finding them living within himself. But he would not pass this sickness on to his child. And wouldn’t it be better if he avoided relationships completely? He would not inflict himself on women. He thought that if he could do nothing el
se for his mother, perhaps he could do that for her.
Sometimes he wondered if Caroline had been frightened of him. He didn’t believe she had, but perhaps that was because he couldn’t bear to believe it. He knew she’d been happy with him, knew because she’d frequently told him. The early days, especially, had been wonderful, and for a while Tom really had thought this time might be all right.
But it was no good. To be a man was to be angry. To be a man was to be afraid.
15
It took Malcolm some time to locate the source of his unease regarding the meal at Fiona’s. He knew it would be awkward for Tommy—was that it? He thought it might be awkward for him too. Someone, at some point, would say the wrong thing, and then there would be one of those silences that Heather had always claimed not to notice. But that wasn’t it either. At root, Malcolm thought it had to do with how little he knew Tommy. His nephew seemed unpredictable.
Fiona had rung up again that morning to confirm, as though it was likely Malcolm could either have forgotten, or received a more glamorous offer in the meantime.
“Of course, Fiona, we’ll be there,” he said. “We’re looking forward to it.”
“Seven still O.K.?”
“Aye, that’s great.”
“You’ll drive, won’t you, Malcolm? It’s a long walk in this weather and darkness.”
“That’s right.”
“I think even the Dougdales will drive.”