by Patrick Gale
He tried to tell himself he was not a violent man. He knew the stories. He knew there were men who beat the same woman week after week, year after incomprehensible year. The series of little digs and pokes they had given each other as they argued had escalated until suddenly, without knowing the force of his own strength, he had shoved her too hard and she had slipped to the floor, knocking her head on the sink as she fell and then on the floor tiles. This did not make him a wife-beater in the same league, perhaps, as the men who branded their wives with steam irons, broke their noses, slammed their hands in drawers. Read purely in physical terms, it was no more horrific than the kind of violence witnessed daily between brawling schoolboys or over-fuelled drinking partners. And yet, his conscience told him there was no degree in this. A spouse was not a school bully or a pool-hall rival. One could argue with her, shout at her, even break her property – these were all clichés of healthily tempestuous domesticity, traditionally reconciled in bed – but one did not touch her in anger. He had only hurt Bonnie the once but on the instant he passed through a one-way turnstile into the company of bad men, men who had to be restrained by court orders or bars. He was now among men whose wives might stab them in self-defence in confidence of a broad measure of public support. With each passing hour, his ability to see himself self-righteously apart from, or above them grew feebler.
At last he was allowed visitors. His mother and John Docherty had been trying to see him ever since his arrest. Lacking any precedent as to the proper form of behaviour in such circumstances, she treated the occasion like a hospital visit. She brought grapes and a bag of treats from Hart’s, a fashionable delicatessen. She brought walnut cake, a Camembert, a bar of bitter chocolate and, with blithe insensitivity, two crime novels from the library. She tried and failed to find anything nice to say about his cell. Then she hugged him and said she didn’t believe a word of it and would stand by him whatever happened. She told him to get a haircut and eat properly then cried so much she had to leave.
John Docherty’s visit was even shorter. He had dressed up as if for a special occasion. Watching him pace nervously about the cell, Lawrence sensed he had worn a suit in case he was seen arriving and photographed. John announced that he had acquired his own solicitor – as business partners they had previously shared the one – and had instructed her to dissolve the partnership.
‘It’s Carol,’ he said and Lawrence pictured his tight-lipped wife. She had seen through him on their first meeting, but misread his covert dislike of her husband as snobbery. ‘She says if even half the things they’re saying are true, she’d leave me if I carried on working with you.’
‘What things …?’ Lawrence began.
‘The papers have got hold of it,’ John told him. ‘The way you beat her, the teeth, the hair, your chainsaw, everything. Goodbye, Lawrence.’
And he left.
Curiously, the dissolution of the partnership came as a relief since it freed Lawrence at least from worrying that he was letting John down by neglecting his work. He was left with the twelve square feet of his windowless cell, daily visits from his mother, his now very own solicitor, whose bill, he feared, must be mounting spectacularly, and the torture of worry. Remorse chewed him from within, relentlessly working over the cold suspicion that he had misjudged his wife, until it was left sourly indigestible, weakening his system ever further, like a kidney stone.
Then he began to dwell on the thought of the body in the wood, the body burned and buried even as he tried to sleep in the cab of his pick-up ten minutes’ walk away, and who the murderer might be and who they might kill next and where else their victims might lie hidden. It occurred to him that Bonnie and Lucy might well be dead, their bodies hidden elsewhere, and once the thought took root in his mind it would not be dislodged by reason. If they were dead then his innocence of their murder would never be proved. He would be condemned and probably found mad as well as murderous.
Faithe let him read copies of day-old newspapers from the staff room. He had become notorious overnight, already tried and condemned in the minds of the reading public. He saw his photograph reproduced repeatedly and Bonnie’s and Lucy’s.
Article after article homed in on Lucy. Was she dead? Abducted? Hiding? Sian the childminder was wheeled out, as was a shattered and vengeful Charlie Knights, full of how ‘Frost’ had wickedly seduced his innocent, motherless daughter when she was barely out of college and he a rough-handed gardener, little more than a caveman in his appetites. Lawrence’s mother was being doorstepped, evidently, as there were shots of her, pinched and harassed, scurrying in dark glasses from car to front door or angrily attempting to shoo photographers out of her gates. Bewilderingly, they had even established that he was illegitimate. After all these years, his mother’s gracious cover had been blown and her son was the last to know. The suspect was portrayed as having a background of privileged hypocrisy. He had learning difficulties, they said. They even tracked down boys he had fought at school. He tried to avoid the articles about him and read of other things but the case appeared to permeate entire newspapers in one form or another. It proved an occasion for leaders on domestic violence, discussions of the purported ill effects of fatherless childhoods and the emotional inarticulacy of the male. It even crept, like a grey mould, into gardening columns.
Inept at remembering the simplest dates and telephone numbers, Lawrence had an almost autistic skill at memorizing the names of trees and shrubs. At agricultural college this had proved a kind of party piece in which he would rattle off name after name to a disbelieving, encyclopaedia-clutching audience. Confined to a cell, with not a green leaf in sight, this proved his salvation, as he found he could empty his mind into readiness for sleep by mentally reciting the names in alphabetical order, from abies to zelcova, forcing himself to stop and begin again from the beginning if he summoned one out of sequence.
The freshly demonized Wumpett Woods were dug over and over again, as was the land around the farmhouse, with no sign of Lucy’s body being unearthed. The local environmentalist lobby was up in arms. A chapter of local Pagans set up camp on the wood’s edge, offering prayers for the deaths of trees and oblations for the dishonouring of the ancient dead. Then, after ten days, a young woman presented herself at Barrowcester police station, announced who she was, and gave ample proof of identity and explanation of absence. There remained the chainsaw from the back of the pick-up truck, clearly of the type used to dismember the body. This was covered in the suspect’s fingerprints and bore a small trace of blood which could be his or his wife’s. However he had used it so thoroughly in the interim that any significant forensic traces had been scoured off or overpowered by sawdust and juice from a cedar of Lebanon, so that alone was scarcely proof enough to sustain a faltering charge. There were now no women on Faithe’s brief list of missing persons whose descriptions bore even a tenuous resemblance to the physical type of the corpse in the wood.
On Lawrence’s release, his solicitor immediately began pressing for him to sue for damages against both the police for wrongful arrest and Charlie Knights and various tabloid newspapers for defamation of character. Lawrence might not be a murderer but he had admitted to hurting his wife, however, so he was reluctant to pursue the matter. The apologies he received were less than profound and the station was mobbed by hostile journalist crews and interested bystanders as soon as news broke of his cleared name. It was now Faithe’s blood they bayed for but their attitude towards him remained prurient and ugly. His farmhouse was vulnerable to invasion. His mother’s place at least had a wall and gates so, while a dummy van lured the mob away, an unmarked car was laid on to whisk him there until the fuss subsided. He sat in the very middle of the back seat, with both doors locked, horribly aware of how smelly his clothes had become and dazzled by the sudden profusion of green flashing past on either side.
CHAPTER FIVE
Long before the tabloids locked teeth on her pampered flesh, Dora Frost had been touched by controversy, having been an unmarried mother
at a time when the adjectives most commonly applied to such women were loose or fallen, not independent. Her father had taken work with an oil company in Southern California uprooting his wife and teenage twins in the process. Dora and Darius had graduated from a Los Angeles high school and been enrolled at university in Berkeley. Dora was to study English and Drama, for she was determined to become an actress, Darius settled for Economics, set only on being spectacularly rich so as to avoid the puritanical ways of their parents. When Dora became pregnant, her father’s first reaction was that she must name the man and marry him. When she named him and he was found to be already married, his second reaction was to banish her back to England where she was to begin a new, quieter life, posing as a young widow.
She and her mother were sent to hide out in the Ahwahnee, a remote, stately hotel deep in the mountain forests of Yosemite for the remainder of the pregnancy, their suite being converted to a private clinic for the actual birth. As a smoke screen, her mother had fostered rumours of a woman’s operation and the need for a long recuperation. Dora, it was to be supposed, was merely keeping her suffering parent company. The imaginary invalid read her way through the hotel library and took long, punitive hikes, leaving Dora and her shame concealed from gossip’s view. Dora played game upon game of patience, spied on hotel guests, counted trees and danced by herself to the radio, hugging her swollen belly with love and rebellious joy as she circled the room. Her only reading was a guide to the trees of North America which she used to identify every tree she could see from the suite’s windows. Since these were mainly redwoods, this was swiftly done, but she liked to think this burst of study had affected her son’s later choice of expertise.
There was a trauma concerning the birth, to which only her mother, the midwife and the doctor were party. Dora never saw either parent again, crossing America by train with Lawrence, and sailing from New York as soon as she was strong enough to travel. From what she inferred from her mother’s few, dry letters and Darius’s later conversation, Dora had no reason to believe that the trauma and its cancerous pain spread any further. To this day she had never spoken of it and intended to take it with her to her grave. There were whole weeks when it failed to cross her mind, then something in Lawrence’s behaviour or the sight of a young mother with a pram would bring it sharply back to her and she would feel briefly nauseous with guilt and uncertainty. She was resolved that this trouble should never curse Lawrence and that it should only influence his childhood for the good. The more it overshadowed her thoughts, the greater her determination to have him live only in the light.
She was attractive and lively so the assumption all round was that she would swiftly find a British husband. She took the name Mrs Robert Frost in honour of the poet she had a crush on at the time. Motherhood absorbed her more than thoughts of matrimony ever had and she soon found that she enjoyed more freedom as a merry widow than any dwindled wives of her acquaintance. When Lawrence was older, she threw herself into the Barrowcester amateur dramatic society, of which, with her looks, legs and facility at jumping accents, she soon became unofficial queen. She caused a stir as Norah, as Blanche Dubois, as Hedda, as a languid Tracey in The Philadelphia Story. She was popular but, because she was at once guarded, mischievous and attractive, close to few and trusted by fewer.
Having enjoyed her brief liaison with an athletic executive met at a country club, for all that it caused her disgrace and trouble, she continued to have affairs with married men. Unlike bachelors, they seemed to appreciate her independence and have no desire to circumscribe it. She was a light sleeper, habitually waking in the small hours to listen to the radio, and it amazed her that married acquaintances could sleep night after night with someone breathing and stirring and mouthing alongside them. Her afternoons might be taken up by the occasional man but she trusted she would pass the nights of her life in luxurious solitude.
Her mother died soon after becoming so unexpectedly a grandparent – died of disappointment, it was said. Her father married a younger woman and died within a year, apparently of exhaustion. Dora cursed both their memories. Darius graduated with honours and followed his sister back to England where he duly became a businessman and Dora’s principal financial support. As the boy grew and a father figure was occasionally required, Darius was happy to fulfil the role. It amused him how often, when brother and sister appeared with the child, they were taken for husband and wife. Darius was a confirmed bachelor and kept whatever private life he enjoyed impenetrably private.
Lawrence was a beautiful child, with unruly blond hair, huge brown eyes and a frequent pink flush to his cheeks – an old-fashioned, even archaic image of innocence. As a baby he never crawled. He spent a worrying extra two months sitting and moonily gazing, then lurched directly into an unsteady walk. He proved similarly slow in learning to talk and tardier still at mastering written language. This was not a problem. Dora was no great reader herself since graduating from high school and was unflagging in her adoration. She would have found a precociously bookish child far more alarming. He turned out to be anti-social, however, a far worse problem in her eyes. Chatty enough at home, he became sullen, wordless and even truculent when left among other children. After repeated, profoundly embarrassing enquiries as to the happiness of what the head teacher called his ‘home situation’, he was asked to leave Barrowcester’s only satisfactory primary school because his withdrawn attitude was thought to be depressing his classmates. Dora’s bustling home tuition in how to be nice and how to make conversation made matters worse for, after a promising start once she had won his connivance with a bribe, he was actually expelled from the cathedral choir school after less than a term for reacting with a storm of tears and what the matron called language when that redoubtable lady had mocked his refusal to answer her simple questions at the lunch table.
Dora was aghast. At home he appeared no less angelic. Questioned, he only cried or froze up in stammering confusion and she abhorred stammerers. She had carved a discreet niche for herself in Barrowcester society and had no desire to jeopardize her position with anything so glaring as a ‘problem child’. For a while she tried teaching Lawrence at home but the effort soon exhausted her slender resources and, anti-social or no, he plainly now missed the company of other children. He became fractious and began to speak to Dora in monosyllables, and then only when spoken to.
‘Perhaps I should tell him?’ she suggested to Darius. ‘Perhaps this is all to do with having no father?’
After much thought they had decided early on that the boy should be raised in the belief that his mother was indeed a widow, that she had married foolishly young, for love, and that his father, a soldier, had been shot down in Vietnam.
‘Tosh,’ Darius snapped when she suggested the infant knew it was being lied to and was obscurely punishing her into truth. ‘He needs a psychiatrist.’
A child psychiatrist was duly procured and Lawrence went to see her twice a week. She discerned dyslexia and saw that the withdrawal and truculence represented frustration at a failure to match his peers in communication skills.
‘If they tease him, he can’t find the words to answer back,’ she said, ‘so he turns in on himself.’
This was no great surprise, but she also unearthed Lawrence’s dexterity.
‘It’s a cliché, I know,’ she said, ‘but he is very good with his hands and we need to focus on that as a way of boosting his self-esteem.’
Dora swallowed her maternal pride and, with the psychiatrist’s intervention, a place was found at a preparatory school for ‘special’ children. The problem apparently had been solved. The boy thrived and, at nine, had caught up sufficiently with his peers to enjoy an ordinary education. His hair remained untameable but there were no more bad reports. He was no high-flier but he enjoyed biology and shone at carpentry to the point of his teacher suggesting he try for national qualifications in the skill. Lawrence made Dora a string box, a letter rack, a bookcase, a garden table, even a piano stool with a musi
c compartment under the seat.
He seemed to develop a sixth sense for preserving his own equilibrium. Far from falling prey to hero worship, he instinctively shunned the company of high achievers, the brilliant, the chatterers, so that as he progressed into the sullen teen years, the only boys he spent silent time with were similarly wordless; sportsmen, plodders, occasionally an uncommunicative ponderer. Dora did not entirely mind this. These were not boys, but premature men, taciturn models of taciturn fathers, and their slouching company made her feel flattered into vivacious ultra-femininity by comparison. It was only a shock when the other plodders acquired girlfriends and moved away to independence and places on surprisingly academic university courses leaving Lawrence still single, still living at home and studying forestry at Arkfield Agricultural College with a bunch of farmers’ sons.
Forestry, Darius gloomily assured her, was notoriously a ‘thicko’s’ subject but the field seemed truly to absorb the boy. For the first time she found her son not just poring over books but eagerly finishing them and acquiring others. He began to train the hedges and trees in her garden and, as an end-of-year project, created a pretty line of espaliered fruit trees along one side of her lawn. He acquired the occasional sullen girlfriend, nothing serious, but persevered in his studies and graduated with a commendation. Dora found that all things to do with gardening and landscape had become deeply fashionable, so that far from snobbishly lamenting his acquiring a trade, she was able to boast of his setting up as a qualified tree surgeon and openly to pity her friends whose children languished on the dole with useless arts degrees and unrealized ambitions.
As to his lack of wanderlust, she was ultimately glad of it. No longer a young widow, and finding her supply of admirers growing shorter with maturity, she was content to have a son close to hand as her prop and comfort. When his business began to take off and he set up home on his own, he moved barely three miles uphill from the village. The admirers that remained were grateful of the liberty this granted her and she allowed herself a certain pleasure in losing her ‘great cuckoo’ as she fondly called him.