Georgia said she’d go shopping and headed for Topshop.
***
She got back on the dot of three, to be told Davina now wouldn’t be there till four.
“Drink?” said Merlin.
“Oh-yes, thank you. Diet Coke if you’ve got one.”
“There’s white wine.”
“No, honestly, I’d prefer the Coke.”
“OK,” he said with his amazing smile. “I’ll follow your example.” Now he’d think she was a killjoy as well as boring.
***
“Sorry about the wait,” Merlin said suddenly. “I’m sure if you wanted to go, it’d be fine.”
“Well… do you think I should?”
“No, no, I’m sure she meant it about wanting to meet you. But if you’ve got something important going on, I know she’d understand. She really is great.”
“Honestly, it’s fine. I don’t have anything to do this evening.”
She shouldn’t have said that; what kind of loser had nothing to do on a Friday night?
“Wish I didn’t.”
No doubt he had to go out clubbing with some glamorous actress.
“My parents’ silver wedding party.”
“Oh, really? Where is it?”
“Elena’s L’Etoile. They’ve got the private room upstairs.”
“Oh… great,” she said, hoping she’d sound as if she knew all about the private room at Elena’s L’Etoile.
***
Davina turned up at five, when almost everyone had gone except Merlin. He was clearly an important ingredient in all this, Georgia thought. Well… good. Davina was an absolutely dazzling black woman, with a wonderful wide grin showing big perfect teeth, her fountain of black hair braided.
She kissed Georgia, said how much she was looking forward to being her mum for a bit. “Bryn says you’re a real find,” she added.
“Now, do we know who’s doing Marje yet, Merlin?”
Merlin said he didn’t.
“Go and find out, darling. I’ve got my fingers crossed for Anna; she’s such fun, and such wonderful stories.”
Merlin went off obediently; Georgia smiled at her.
“I love your hair,” she said tentatively into the slightly long silence, and then felt silly; but Davina smiled and said, “Well, I’m hoping everyone will; it’s taken me four days.”
“Do you do it yourself?” asked Georgia.
“Of course. I enjoy it; it’s therapy. Hard on the arms, but-”
Bryn came into the room.
“Davina, my darling, how totally gorgeous you look. Come on into my office; meet Mariella. Georgia, you were great today. And I hope Davina’ll be pleased to hear Anna’s cast as Marje. She related very well to Georgia here.”
“That’s marvellous. Georgia, I’d have loved to chat a bit longer, but I’ve got to go after this. Got a train to catch to Paris.”
Georgia thought how glamorous that sounded, and indeed how wonderful all the rest of the day had been, and then of her own train going to Cardiff, and suddenly felt the nightmare closing in again. She didn’t want the day to end; she really didn’t… She wondered what Linda was doing and if she’d have left the office yet. She might be able to go and see her-she was pretty near-and she could tell her about her day. It would keep the glamour going a bit longer…
***
Linda was delighted to hear from her; she told her to hurry round to the office and they could have a glass of wine to celebrate what had obviously been a successful day.
***
Mary was up in her room at six o’clock; she had just had a bath and was lying on her bed, in her dressing gown and slippers, before getting dressed again for supper. She liked to do that; it gave Christine the run of the kitchen, and helped ease the general tension. Which was still not easing much. She had spent much of the day reading another letter from Russell, over and over again. It was the most wonderful letter, four pages of it, telling her how much he loved her and was missing her and how he had been wondering where they should live.
“It will be difficult deciding; we will both want to be in our own countries. Right now I’m thinking we might split the year and do six months in each-buy two houses. Or maybe three months and then a change. You have a rival, I’m afraid-I have fallen in love with Bath and the surrounding countryside-and I know you will love many places in the States. That way we can each see as much or as little of our respective families as we and they wish.”
The thought of having two homes made Mary feel quite dizzy.
She was just getting the letter out of her bag to read it yet again when Christine called up the stairs.
“Quick, Mum, they’ve just trailed an item about the crash. Come on, hurry up or you’ll miss it. And do be careful on the stairs in those slippers.”
She sounded more her old self, seeing Mary as some sort of elderly child. Well, it was better than being an adulteress…
***
Linda decided to watch the news while she waited for Georgia. She felt she needed a glass of wine; she was just pouring it when a familiar, a horribly familiar scene presented itself…
***
The children were all in bed when Maeve arrived home, still deeply upset at Patrick’s behaviour. Her mother told her to go and sit down in the front room while she made some tea. She brought it in on a tray, together with some biscuits and the remains of a box of chocolates, and then joined Maeve and suggested they watch TV for a bit.
“Put your feet up, darlin’; it’ll do you good. This’ll soon be over, the news, and then we can watch-Oh, my God. Maeve, do you see what they’re doing…”
For there on the screen was some old footage from the crash: the horrible, horrible footage of Patrick’s lorry, the trailer lying on its side, and the cars scattered about it like toys, and then there was a quick rundown about it, when it had been, how many people had been involved…
***
“But two weeks later, there is some good news. The lorry driver is recovering well and is expected to be out of intensive care in a few more days; the baby boy born prematurely is thriving and is going home this weekend; and the famous golden retriever who was lost in the chaos turned up at a farm and has been reunited with her owner. In fact, you can see Bella for yourselves in a couple of minutes; we have her in the studio with one very happy owner. But before we do that, there is one rather more serious matter. The police are still gathering evidence on events leading up to the crash and would be interested in hearing from anyone who may have seen something they feel is relevant that afternoon: a car or van possibly driving erratically-or perhaps some debris on the road…
“All calls would be treated as confidential. They are particularly interested in a young girl who-”
“Oh, my God,” said Maeve. “Oh, my dear Lord.”
***.
“Laura, put the telly on quickly. Channel Eight, the news. Don’t ask; just do it…”
***
“… a young girl who was seen by several people at the scene and is thought to have been possibly travelling in the lorry, and who has not yet come forward…”
***
“Hi, Linda, I brought you a bottle of-Oh, my God, what’s that about…? Oh, my God…”
***
“So if you know anything of this girl, or you think you know where she might be, please do get in touch with the police-in confidence. They do stress that there is no suggestion of anything suspicious, merely that in a crash as big as this one, there must be no stone left unturned in the subsequent investigation. And now, as promised, we have Bella and her owner, Jenny Smith, from Northamptonshire…”
***
“Oh, Mother Mary and all the saints,” said Maeve.
***
“Oh, I do hope Maeve is watching,” said Mary.
***
“How extraordinary,” said Laura.
***
Georgia made an odd sound; Linda looked at her. She was absolutely ashen, her hand clasped ov
er her mouth. She suddenly sat down, as if her legs wouldn’t hold her any longer, her eyes still fixed on the screen.
“ Georgia,” said Linda very gently. “ Georgia, was that… you?”
CHAPTER 28
The story had come out haltingly, punctuated with much weeping and sheer blind terror at what she had done-and concealed-through two long, dreadful weeks.
She had quite simply panicked: Linda had tried to tell her that it was not so unusual, not so terrible a thing to do. But Georgia would have none of it: “It was horrible, awful. He’d been so kind to me, and there he was unconscious, with God knows what injuries, and did I try to help? No, I just ran. It was disgusting of me, Linda; I’m so, so ashamed. But somehow the longer I left it, the worse it seemed. And do you know what my very first thought was? After we’d crashed? That I’d miss the audition. Can you imagine anything as awful as that?”
“You were in shock; it brings about some very strange behaviour.”
She had felt dazed at first, she said, not sure what she was doing, and, “I felt very sick and dizzy. Two men by the lorry asked me if I was all right and I couldn’t speak to them; I threw up right there in front of them; it was horrible. And then I had to sit down for a bit. Everyone was much too busy looking after people who were really hurt to bother about me. After that I climbed over the barrier, by the hard shoulder, and slithered down the bank and started running. All I could think of was getting away; does that sound crazy?”
Linda shook her head. “Not at all.”
“There were all these cars crashed into one another, and huge white things everywhere. I didn’t know what they were then, but of course they were Patrick’s load, fridges and freezers and stuff. I just turned my back on it all and ran-towards Cardiff. That was all I wanted: to get home. I found a sort of track thing and followed that, and when I couldn’t run anymore I walked, on and on. Every yard I went, I felt less frightened; I was farther away from it all; I felt… safer. How weird was that? I cut up into that bloke’s land, that farmer guy who was just on the TV, and then on to a village, and then I hitched a lift in a car going to Bristol.
“The driver said he’d been avoiding the M4, that there’d been a terrible crash, miles and miles of tailback, and I had to pretend to be surprised. Oh, God…”
In Bristol she had eventually managed to get a lift in a lorry going to Cardiff. “I was scared of being in another one; I thought he might crash too-”
“And… tell me, do you think Patrick went to sleep?”
“No! Of course he didn’t go to sleep. It wasn’t his fault in any way at all. In fact…” She paused, gathered her breath, then said in a desperate shaky tone, “In fact, if it was anyone’s fault it was probably mine.”
***
Shaking, clinging to Linda’s hand, she rang the programme help line, who said they’d get the police to call her.
“Pretty soon, they said… Linda, I feel sick. I feel so awful. What will they think of me; what will they do to me? I’m disgusting; I deserve to be… to be put away somewhere. Oh, dear. Can I have another cigarette?”
It was a measure of her distress and of Linda’s intense sympathy with that distress that Linda had actually agreed to let her smoke. She loathed not just smoking, but smokers. To allow Georgia to smoke in her flat was akin to handing round glasses of wine at an AA meeting.
It was she who took the call; she passed the phone to Georgia.
“It’s a Sergeant Freeman.”
“Thanks. Hello. Yes, this is Georgia Linley Yes, I did. Of course. Yes, I think I can help. I’ll… I’ll ask… Um, Linda, they want us to meet them at some police station in the morning. They’re going to ring back with the exact address. Is that OK?… Yes? Hello. Yes, that’s fine. Thank you. What? No, it’s not my mum; it’s my agent. No, I’m fine, thank you. I’ll be there in the morning.”
She put the phone down and looked at Linda, her face somehow gaunt, her dark eyes red with weeping, her small, pretty nose running; she wiped it on the back of her hand. She looked about six.
“You will come with me, won’t you?” she said with a tremor in her voice.
Linda held out her arms and said, “Of course I will. Come here, you.”
And Georgia went to sit next to her on the sofa, resting her head on Linda’s shoulder, and said, “I couldn’t do all this without you, you know.”
“Well, I’m glad to have helped.”
“You have. So, so much.” Another sniff, then: “You’d be a great mum, you know. You really should, before it’s too late…”
“Well… thanks,” said Linda.
***
The police were very kind, very gentle with her.
She sat, her teeth chattering with fright at first, but still telling her story perfectly lucidly, up to the point of the actual crash.
“We were just going along very steadily, chatting. Patrick was absolutely fine, not going fast at all, driving really carefully in the middle lane. We’d been through a storm-that was quite scary; it got very dark, and he slowed down a bit, said the water on the road was dangerous after the heat. But the sun was out again; it had stopped raining. And then-suddenly-there was this great crack of noise and we couldn’t see. Not at all. It wasn’t dark, just everything blurred. It was like being blind. It was so, so frightening, because the windscreen was just… well, you know, impossible to see through. And Patrick just… well, slammed on the brakes and then swerved, quite sharply, and he was hooting and shouting-”
“Shouting? What was he shouting?”
“Oh, things like, ‘For the love of God,’ and, ‘Jesus’-well, he is Irish,” she said with the ghost of a smile. “And then the lorry just wouldn’t stop; it went on and on-it seemed for hours I couldn’t see anything, except out of the side window, and I could see we were going completely across the middle of the road, with the traffic on the other side coming towards us. It was weird; it all happened so slowly. And then… then we stopped. And I felt a sort of violent lurch as the trailer went, and there was this horrible noise and… Oh, dear, sorry.” She started to cry.
“Now, now,” said Sergeant Freeman, “no need for tears; you’ve been most helpful-your account is quite invaluable. With the lorry driver unable to remember anything much, this is the first really lucid account we’ve had. So, what did you think had happened? To cause it?”
“Well, the windscreen shattered. There wasn’t a hole in it; the glass just had all these weird patterns all over it, making it impossible to see.”
“Something hit it, perhaps? Maybe that was the crack you heard.”
“Yes, but what could it have been?”
“That’s for us to find out. You can stop worrying about it now.”
“You’re being so kind,” she said. “You must be so… so shocked at me, by what I did.”
“Miss Linley” Freeman said, “if you saw one percent of what we do, you’d understand that we’re not very easily shocked. Isn’t that right, Constable?”
“Absolutely right,” said Constable Rowe.
“You might be shocked at this, though,” she said, in a voice so low it was almost inaudible. “I think… well, I think some of it… could… could have been my fault. You see, I… well, I dropped a can of drink. As we swerved. On the floor. It was rolling around. I think… it might have interfered with Patrick’s-Mr. Connell’s-brakes. And if I hadn’t done that, maybe he could have stopped. I mean… oh, God-”
“Miss Linley,” said Sergeant Freeman, “we will of course put this into our report. But I really don’t think you should worry about it too much. The brakes in those things are huge, very powerful, and power-assisted. One small can of drink rolling around would not have had the slightest effect. What would you say, Constable?”
Constable Rowe smiled at Georgia and said yes, indeed, he would say the same thing.
He found himself very moved by Georgia ’s distress. She hardly looked old enough to be out in the world at all, let alone hitching lifts in lorries.
“Really?”
“Really. I hope that makes you feel better.”
“It does. A bit.” But she was still looking very uncertain.
“So… you would say the whole accident was caused by this shattering of the windscreen? By Mr. Connell being unable to see? Not because of any other cars? Please think very carefully, Miss Linley; it’s very important. Very important indeed.”
“Oh-definitely, yes. Suddenly, he had to drive without being able to see. It was like he was blindfolded. That was the only reason, I’m sure.”
“Well, that’s pretty clear. Now, let’s just talk about the other cars, Miss Linley. Did you notice any in particular?”
“Oh… a few. You notice everything from up there. I was talking to Patrick, describing things to him; he asked me to, said it helped ward off what he called the monster.”
Sergeant Freeman looked up sharply.
“What monster would that be?”
“Well… being sleepy. He said it was like a sticky monster in his head. But”-she looked at them-“but he was not, I swear to you, not remotely near going to sleep; you really do have to believe me-”
“It’s all right,” said Freeman, and despite the soothing words, Linda thought that she could detect a slight change in his expression. “That’s absolutely fine. Now, go on; tell us about the other cars.”
The Best Of Times Page 26