by Patrick Gale
The advent of Bonnie in Lawrence’s life was an unlooked-for delight. Dora had long felt keenly her lack of a daughter and Bonnie was entirely the kind of daughter for which she would have wished. She warmed to her instantly – with her liveliness, independence and early pregnancy, the girl was an echo of her own younger self – and loved her not least for the final vindication Bonnie’s love seemed to grant her undervalued son. Dora was no great advocate of marriage, regarding it as the obstacle to be overcome in most people’s lives rather than the happy goal towards which their faltering steps should tend. She made an exception for Lawrence, however. Without a wife, she feared, there would always be something unfinished about him. Prettier and brighter (and wealthier) than any of her murky predecessors, Bonnie should not only finish his education but prove his indefinite visa to what Dora thought of as The World – a world where people loved, bred, paid visits, issued invitations, achieved social consequence. For the sake of form, she felt she must register at least some disapproval at their carelessness over the pregnancy but she confided in Darius that in such cases one could be sure that, whatever problems might beset the couple, their sex life would be regular. When the baby proved to be a girl, she was thrilled. She had always observed the love between fathers and daughters to be far less problematic than the competitive, ambivalent bond between fathers and their sons. In her heart, she hoped that Lucy would ensnare her father as she had never sufficiently succeeded in ensnaring her own. The girl would settle Dora’s oldest score and thereby legitimize both bastard father and outcast grandmother.
Dora had no inkling that anything was awry in her son’s marriage until Bonnie’s disappearance. They did not always present her with a falsely smiling front. She knew they argued. Lucy had recently mentioned that they shouted at each other sometimes. Bonnie often came round, ostensibly to drop Lucy off for a few hours, and over a drink or coffee would enjoy a daughterly moan, but it was all ordinary stuff about how uncommunicative he could be, about how maddeningly unambitious she found him, about how pent-up his emotions had been. Nothing about violence. Not a murmur. Not a bruise. God knew, Dora was no believer in wifely stoicism, but she had observed enough poisoned partnerships in her time to know that it took more than a single slap to drive a wife to break silence and run. Bitter though the idea was, she found herself pressured to assume, like everybody else, that Bonnie had been beaten repeatedly.
The revelation was a betrayal of friendship. Dora had plenty of women she thoughtlessly referred to as friends but in fact these were merely women she saw, women who rang up, women who included her in their plans, people dismissed by Darius as ‘diary-fillers’. Although Bonnie was so much younger than she, they swiftly became true intimates, calling each other every day, if only to speak about nothing in particular. Lacking a mother or sisters, Bonnie needed an older woman’s solidarity through her pregnancy and the early months of motherhood. Each was lively in company because they felt that was expected of them but alone together they allowed themselves the luxury of gravity. They lay on chairs in Dora’s garden or curled up on her sofa and discussed death, love and their parents with an openness and lack of protective irony Dora had not experienced since she was at high school. She knew how close their friendship had become when she perceived that neither of them had let on to Lawrence how much they saw of one another; a friendship which excluded a husband was close indeed. And yet, for Bonnie, Lawrence had continued to come first all the while since she had kept entirely silent about the state of their marriage. Or perhaps it was Dora she had been protecting, aware how profoundly the truth concerning her son’s inadequacy would wound her?
When the butch woman detective turned up on her doorstep asking questions, Dora was angry with Charlie Knights for taking such an hysterical step as registering Bonnie as a missing person, when the girl had probably locked herself and her daughter away on a health farm for a few quiet, feminine days to think over her situation. When Detective Inspector Faithe began asking questions about Lawrence’s violence, Dora became furious. As she could tell the detective in all honesty, she had seen no signs of domestic violence and it struck her that perhaps it was all a jealous father’s sick fantasy. The odious man had manipulated Faithe and was blackening her poor boy’s name groundlessly!
‘I’m afraid not,’ Faithe told her, and with disarming gentleness explained that they had physical evidence.
When Lawrence was arrested for Bonnie’s murder, Dora attempted, purely as an experiment, to believe him guilty. The very thought induced an almost physical revulsion in her. It was as unnatural as trying to breathe underwater. She knew Lawrence too intimately. She had suckled him, nursed him through fevers, bandaged his cuts, washed his clothes. It was axiomatic that most murders were among friends, yet to believe someone a murderer, they must be made an alien or an enemy or at least no more than a passing acquaintance. Granted, she could just, and guiltily, believe him capable of pushing Bonnie around a bit, but murder … Besides, she knew he adored Lucy, sensed he would do nothing to frighten or harm her so it followed that he would not harm her mother. Surely it did!
Suddenly Dora found herself in the position of murderer’s mum, besieged by journalists who, when she deigned to speak to them, garbled her words into a grotesquely inappropriate Cockney so that she was reported as defending ‘my boy’ and ‘my brave lad, Larry’ and portrayed, on the strength of one, routine visit to the parish church to buy cheap postcards, as a religious maniac.
She had not taken a newspaper for years, preferring to glean whatever news might come her way through the calmer medium of the kitchen and bedside radios. The village newsagent now began to deliver her a daily tabloid, however, either from sanctimonious spite or from a faintly charming reverence for neighbourhood notoriety. After the initial shock, Dora took to reading them calmly at the kitchen table with coffee and biscuits. She cut out any mentions of herself or Lawrence and pasted them tidily into a scrapbook she kept hidden in a drawer of her desk.
The gleeful revelation that she had been posing as a widow all these years and had, in fact, never been married, caused her comparatively little grief. None of her neighbours was speaking to her by now in any case. A year, even six months ago, she would have predicted such disgrace would bring her measured rural life to an end but in this context it was almost welcome, a sign that she was merely flesh and blood, human, not a monster after all. The journalist who had gone to so much trouble had even, God knew how, found a charming Californian snapshot of her with some high school pals, aged seventeen, all legs and laughter and puffed-out skirt. She was appalled and saddened at how young and vulnerable she looked back then and felt a fresh stab of loathing for her dead mother.
Were he still a husband rather than a widower, Charlie Knights would surely have been a suitable specimen for Dora’s collection. He was no Adonis, but she did not require beauty in a male. With his thick-set build, receding, iron-grey hair cropped close to bristle, broken nose, hands like clutches of sausage and a fondness for double-breasted suits, he resembled a retired boxer, rugger coach or American general and made her feel small and delicate although she was neither. She knew him by sight long before their children met, and they had finally been introduced at a wedding, ironically enough, by her married man of the moment. He was sexy in the forceful, who-gives-a-damn manner of ugly men with money and he was plainly keen on her. She could tell from the way he held her hand a second longer than was necessary and from his posture as he stood foursquare before her in the stifling marquee. She knew from local gossip that he was said to visit prostitutes, even to have one on permanent retainer, and that excited her interest in return. It implied an anti-romantic approach to passion akin to her own. She also took the stories as a warning, however, that he was the kind of man who liked to annexe a woman. Dora was not wee wifey material. She moved on, grateful for the narrow escape, only to be brought face to face with him again when Lawrence displayed such uncharacteristic romantic brio in taking up with his daughter.
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Ostensibly doing her bit to oil troubled waters, she let Charlie buy her dinner. He sat and talked about himself. She sat and imagined him red-faced and naked. As he made a show of ordering a cognac then rejecting the few the restaurant had to offer, she was tempted afresh. Happily she maintained old-fashioned values in allowing no more than a peck on a first date, and Darius was on hand to prevent her venturing on a second. He made unkind jokes about a Shakespearean double wedding and emphasized the hideousness of being forced to continue socializing with Charlie for years after the relationship reached its conclusion, as her affairs tended to, in a matter of months.
‘If you wanted to marry him,’ he went on, ‘that would be another thing entirely. You know I’d like nothing better than to see you settled well.’
‘But I don’t,’ she protested. ‘I couldn’t! Mrs Charlie Knights? And leave my pretty house to live in that great, sad barn of a place?’
‘Quite. So you wouldn’t even consider it? If he asked you, that is.’
‘Darius, no!’
She had dined with Charlie several times since and had used the occasions to introduce him to other eligible spinsters of the parish. To the best of her knowledge, none of these aroused his interest as she had, but he read her signals and ceased paying court. Just occasionally, when his possessiveness had irritated her or his apparent solitude had caused her a filial pang, Bonnie might murmur how she wished he would marry again. Dora would entertain an immediate rear-view image of him with some woman decked out in sacrificial cream lace and experience a twinge of jealous panic.
The journalists faded away as suddenly as they had come. Doubtless they would be back for the trial but there was no one, therefore, to photograph Dora as she sped her car out of the drive. Leaving the village behind her as she drove towards Barrowcester, she tweaked off her silk scarf and dark glasses, feeling as foolish and obscurely wounded as any temporary celebrity whose fleeting star has just lost its ascendancy.
Charlie’s house lay in the lee of a hill. Gloomy to the rear, it still commanded a fine view across the fields to the city, had the River Bross babbling at the garden’s edge and might have proved quite charming in understanding hands. A mason at heart, however, he had stripped the house of the Virginia creeper that had once lent a bronzy softness to its edges and so repointed and retiled and repainted the place that he had pared a century off its appearance leaving it bald amid the surrounding green. The weedless lawn had been extended to swallow the spaces where flower beds had once been. The gravel on the drive was an inorganic shade of orange and the terrace, where Dora would have placed some pretty Edwardian benches in fanciful wrought iron, sported generic patio furniture in ageless white plastic. The cliché repelled her but it was, she reflected afresh, a house in urgent need of a woman’s touch. It lacked any trace of the unnecessary or the playful. It might have been a conference centre or the rural head office of a building society.
Pulling up in her car, Dora found the place fed her righteous anger so that by the time she was knocking on the front door she was ready for a fight and jumpy as a lover before a second assignation. She paused then knocked again furiously, glowering up at the blank windows. Dogs bayed deep within the building, then their voices grew louder as an inner door opened and she heard the skittering of claws on tiles as the barking drew nearer the porch.
‘Shut up,’ she heard him groan. ‘Rex. Megan. Get down. Will you shut up you silly bitch!’
When he opened the door, the Dobermans were hunched obediently on the floor but they jumped up as soon as they sensed his recognition and pushed forwards past him to sniff Dora’s skirt and lick her offered hands.
‘Dora!’ he exclaimed and held out his arms as if to embrace her. ‘I’m so very sorry.’
But she pushed angrily past him into the cavernous, under-furnished hall.
‘The hell you are. This entire nightmare’s of your making. You called the police. You spoke to the papers.’
‘I didn’t.’
‘Well who else was it? You were quoted. You said he’s been beating her for months.’
‘I never said that.’
‘One bad spat and he’s locked up and as good as found guilty of murder. When this is over, you’ll look ridiculous and he’ll have to move. I hope he sues you. As for Bonnie, wherever she’s gone, you’ve stirred up such a stink she’s probably afraid of coming back now.’
‘You assume she’s alive.’
‘Well of course she is. You don’t honestly think that poor creature they found in the woods …?’
Without thinking, she had led the way into the sitting room and claimed a deep leather armchair. The dogs promptly sat on either side of her so the three of them now faced him. Megan, the bitch, leaned heavily against her knees and Dora stroked her ears abstractedly. Now that she was looking at him properly, she was shocked at the alteration in him. His jaw was silvered with stubble. His eyes were bloodshot and shadowed from lack of sleep. As he sat heavily on a sofa, he was so hunched, so shrunk into himself, that her pity was immediate.
‘Oh my God,’ she exclaimed, deeply regretting her anger, ‘You really do think it’s her!’ Looking even more the hopeless convict than Lawrence, he raised a big hand to shade his eyes and let out a harsh sob. ‘Charlie?’ she asked. ‘Charlie, stop it!’
She hurried over to sit on the sofa beside him. As she drew near, he was slapping out blindly with his free hand, desperate in his shame, as though her mere concern were an unmanning touch he must fight off. The moment he felt her arm across his shoulder, however, he abandoned all show of strength and surrendered to her sympathy, slumping into her embrace and sobbing, his stubble rough against her neck. Twisted unnaturally, she held him close, resisting the impulse to hang the consequences, slip down to the rug and pull him on top of her. She ran a hand repeatedly across his hair and solid back, aware that her guilty fingers felt the body not the clothes that hid it.
‘She’s fine,’ she murmured. ‘You’ll see. They’ll run tests and prove it’s not her. She’ll come back. And Lucy. Of course they will. Ssh. Don’t. She’ll be back.’
His anguish was contagious. She remained convinced that Lawrence was blameless but her certainty that Bonnie was alive and merely in hiding was weakening by the second, even as she sought to reassure him. Imperceptibly her assurances turned to prayer and it may well have been because she was saying, ‘Please let them be alive,’ aloud as she rocked him in her arms that she missed the sound of the approaching car. All she knew was that suddenly the dogs had rushed into the hall and returned with Lucy who stood for a moment staring at the tableau of her embracing grandparents while the animals licked ecstatically at her face.
Dora stared too for a moment, unable to believe the small, stolid vision before her, then she sprang away from Charlie, lurched awkwardly to her feet and ran to sweep the astonished child into her arms. She felt the tears wet on her face as she laughed and squeezed and drew the familiar soapy-sweet smell of her into her nostrils as if crazed with hunger. She was dimly aware of Charlie coming up to hug her and Lucy in one, then pulled away to set Lucy down and hurry, with the barking dogs, back to the hall.
Bonnie entered her father’s house slowly, wearing dark glasses and charcoal wool, like a principal mourner. She had lost weight. Dora had never seen her so gravely composed. One cheek still bore the yellow marks of a fading bruise.
‘Lucy, dear, go back to the car. Granny and Grandpa and I need to talk.’
‘But– ’ Lucy started to protest.
‘Now, Lucy.’
Dora received the child’s fulsome, sticky kiss on her cheek and let her go. Bonnie staggered slightly as she drew near. Dora held her close, feeling the bones beneath the wool, imagining bruises.
‘Dad,’ she heard her say over her shoulder. ‘Hello. You look terrible. I went to Paris,’ she muttered on. ‘I had the tooth fixed there. They made a porcelain one and had to sort of screw it into my jaw bone. Hurt like hell. There was nothing in any of the pap
ers there. Not a thing. Craig paid for everything. I left my wallet on the train like an idiot.’
‘Craig?’
‘You remember. My client on the university job. From Chicago.’
Oh yes. Thank God. Thank God! Dora began to laugh, clasping Bonnie afresh. ‘I knew it wasn’t you in the wood. I knew it. Because of Lucy, as much as anything. I told your Pa just now. I even prayed!’
Dora felt Charlie standing by them. She pulled back, feeling she must let him have a share of Bonnie, but he only stared and, rather than touch him, Bonnie chattered on as though the sight of him so ruined, in such obvious emotional need, unnerved her.
‘It wasn’t in any of the papers. Not the French ones. I only found out when we came back this morning and it was all over the place. Craig drove me straight down.’
‘He’s here?’
‘He’s out in the car. I wanted to see you on my own. Oh Dora, what am I going to do?’
‘You must go to the police. Tell them you’re still alive.'
‘Bonnie laughed at her simplicity.
‘Not that. Well of course I’ll do that. I’ll go in a bit. No. I meant generally. Do generally. I miss him, Dora. I miss him in spite of everything. I could walk into those cells and drive home with him tonight.’
‘You’re joking. He broke your tooth, for Christ’s sake. He bruised your cheek.’
‘Knocked me out cold, you mean. He gave me a bloody great egg on the back of my head on the edge of the sink.’ Bonnie laughed dryly, touching the spot with her fingertips. ‘He nearly fractured my bloody skull.’
‘He could have killed you, then!’
‘He didn’t mean to. He needs help, Dora. He needs therapy, that’s all.’