by Patrick Gale
There was no need for any careful preambles, of course. Her worried rehearsals had been in vain. The mere shock of her being there, Charlie too, alerted them that something was badly wrong and involved either Bonnie or Lucy or both. All she had to do was tell them which and she heard herself do it with brutal swiftness, her words a lancing knife. Lawrence did not weep or cry out but all the blood drained from his face and he sank onto his suitcase while Darius asked all the questions for him. When? How? Did she suffer? What was the medical opinion? What about the funeral?
They had missed the funeral, naturally. That would be the hardest thing for Lawrence. Arriving too late, he was deprived of a body to hold, of the grim reassurance in planting a farewell kiss on ice-cold flesh, deprived too of a ritual to enact. All Dora could do was tell him – or rather tell him through Darius-who had been there, what music, what readings had been heard and where in Chicago the grave could be found. She hated the milling crowd, the suitcases that kept bumping her shins, the uncomprehending, gawping witnesses whose prurience inhibited her so she could not hug him, could not touch him, for fear of the torrent of grief the natural contact would unstop within her.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Charlie murmured. ‘Christ, Lawrence, I’m so sorry.’ His voice cracked and he turned aside. Dora glared at an old woman who was staring, then almost jumped as Lawrence spoke at last.
‘Where does he live? I could be there by lunch time.’
‘I …’ She stammered. ‘Lawrence, I can’t. I promised. It’s better not. We can see the grave, go there together, then we’ll take you home.’
He looked away as he spoke, controlling his anger.
‘Just give me the address.’
‘The cemetery? It’s easy, you– ’
‘The house. Where does he live?’
‘I … Darling, I can’t.’
‘I have to see where it happened.’
‘No. Come away. It’s for the best. Honestly. Let it go. Come home with us.’
‘I don’t fucking want to come home.’
The venom in his voice roused Charlie who turned back and tried to intervene in the worst possible way.
‘Don’t talk to your mother like that! Don’t you see, you idiot? She’s promised Craig. We both have. You’re to stay away.’
‘For God’s sake,’ Lawrence hissed and shook Charlie off.
‘Come on,’ Darius said in a furious undertone. ‘All of you. Let’s get away from here. Somewhere quiet where we can talk this through.’
‘Darius is right,’ Dora said. ‘Please, darling. No one’s forcing you but please come home. We can take things one step at a time.’
At this moment Dora noticed two things: that there was a young man with Darius, actually holding one of Darius’s cases, and that the rude woman who had been staring had slipped forward through the crowd and was talking softly. She was short, deeply tanned, with white hair and a face like an old apple. She was American. Holding Lawrence’s hand and kissing it as Dora had longed to do, she actually invited him to stay with her for a while to decide what he wanted to do. The woman spoke as rudely as she had stared, ignoring Dora and Darius, ignoring everyone except Lawrence. Then to Dora’s amazement and intense unhappiness, Lawrence nodded, stood, picked up his case and walked into the crowd with her without a backward glance. No one tried to stop him. They were too surprised. Darius later explained who the woman was, but for Dora the hurt remained. He had preferred someone else’s mother to his own, and done it publicly.
They were late checking in for the flight home and even when Darius pleaded compassionate grounds it proved impossible to find four seats together. She assumed Darius would travel with her but, to her surprise, he sat with the young man, whose name was Reuben Calder, and left her with Charlie. This worked out better than she had expected. It was as though the confrontation with Lawrence had flicked some switch in Charlie’s brain or perhaps he was merely reassured that Lawrence was not returning to England with them. Whatever the reason, he was no longer frozen in mourning. He did not become a chattering charmer either but he was warmer, solicitous. He shielded Dora from the stewardesses, from the other passengers. He ordered her two drinks, sensing one was insufficient, fetched her a blanket and pillow, even asked a noisy neighbour, quite politely, to move rather than continue to chat across the aisle beside them.
‘I’m sorry about Lawrence,’ he said after they had each handed in their half-eaten dinners and ordered more whisky. ‘I shouldn’t have interfered.’
‘It’s not your fault,’ she sighed. ‘Nothing you said could have made the slightest difference. He hates me. I see that now.’
‘No he doesn’t.’
‘I’m not what he needs and I’ve got to get used to it.’
As the other passengers began to watch a film and she downed a sleeping pill and nestled into her pillow, she felt him take her hand and hold it between his on his lap. This felt good. He was still holding her hand when he gently woke her, his voice husky from lack of sleep, as they began the slow descent to Birmingham. He retrieved her luggage for her, drove her home and slept off his jet lag beside her.
At long last, with no discussion, no seduction, no teasing glances or passionate embrace, they embarked on their long overdue affair. To start with, they often wept together as they made love and all her memories of his earliest, searching kisses, were tear-pickled. Tender from grief, she forgot all her old love of a solitary bed and habit of sleeping lightly. They spent night after night in his bed or hers and she slept for dreamless hours without waking. They laid no plans, recovering as they both were from a crisis, but when he gave her a necklace of garnets and said he loved her, she did not panic and did not try to escape, but accepted jewellery and adoration with a guarded, careful pleasure and realized she was falling in love in return. For the moment, however, Dora said nothing to anyone. Not to Hecate, whom she continued to see in the afternoons, and not to Darius. Used to secrecy, accepting as yet that they had little in common when they were up and dressed, Charlie obliged her with a similar discretion.
As for Darius’s young man, she had assumed he offered no more to her brother than one of those short-lived friendships forged during the temporary adversity of a poorly planned holiday and she was embarrassed when Darius announced that he was bringing him to stay for a weekend, lest her indifference had given offence. Far from being on the defensive, however, Reuben Calder had come armed to charm. She had thought him a lightweight, a wastrel even, but once he had done with praising her house and garden, insisting she leave her hair just as it was and encouraging her to talk at length about Lawrence and Bonnie and poor little Lucy, and to show him photographs, she found him a witty and sensitive listener.
His sister had formed an unsuitable attachment, apparently on impulse, and had forsaken brother, house, teaching post, her life, in fact, to prolong it. Reuben was unnerved by this, and feigned an angry dismay, but Dora sensed that it was the withdrawal of his sister that had enabled him to form the blithe attachment she witnessed developing over a succession of months. He feared her sudden return, perhaps, and how it might affect his new happiness.
As for Darius, he was a man transformed. Compensating for Lawrence’s lack of a father, he had long affected a dignity beyond his years. Now his ageing had not merely halted on the kinder side of fifty but was perceptibly shifting into reverse gear. Weekend after weekend she watched his walk, his voice, his dress, his hair, his taste in music, even his vocabulary take a turn for the younger.
Ordinarily a twin in her position might have felt forlorn and obscurely slighted but, while it was true that she sometimes found the spectacle of his happiness a trifle too bright to bear at close quarters, she was experiencing fresh pleasures of her own. Just as Reuben seemed set free by the departure of his sister, so she had to admit that the continuing absence of her son and, indeed, her daughter-in-law, had loosened certain constraints upon her. She and, she supposed, Darius felt at once less responsible than they had done, and l
ess watched.
Unlikely as it might have seemed two years ago, Hecate Murray was her new, best friend. Stern but true, a widow shunned by her more sophisticated children, she had set about saving Dora’s soul with a mixture of slyness and zeal. She lent her novels with uplifting endings and coaxed her repeatedly into the cathedral or to various country churches, albeit on the pretext of admiring architecture or memorial tablets. She spoke of Jesus as of an intimate friend with such frequency that Dora caught herself thinking of him as someone they might run into any day. Realizing, to her surprise, that she was growing fond of this insistent and penetrating woman, Dora demanded that all evangelizing cease.
‘I could no more become a Christian than I could a Hindu,’ she declared firmly. ‘You may pray for me as much as you like, but please do it out of my hearing. I believe that when we die we stop and there’s an end. I am entirely for this world, Hecate, not the next. Your trying to convert me any further would be both insensitive and unfriendly.’
On the understanding that this world, unlike the next, could do with some immediate attention, she encouraged Hecate to join her as a prison visitor at Barrowcester’s jail and found her friend excelled at the work, not least because many of the hardened lifers, unlike Dora, were keen to embrace Jesus as an intimate friend, especially if his ambassadress could slip them packets of cigarettes and chocolate along with her uplifting texts.
‘Jesus enjoyed a drink, clearly,’ Hecate defended herself against Dora’s sarcasm. ‘So I know he’d have smoked too, if tobacco had been available to him.’
After cruel months of silence, Lawrence sent her a characteristically brief postcard of a giant redwood with a car driving through a hole in its trunk. It asked her to sell off his equipment and put his workshop and his house up for sale. She guessed, with a heavy heart, that he had found or was seeking work in California and would not be coming home. There was a firm of auctioneers on the edge of the city which held sales every Saturday of miscellanea including tools and furniture. They would gladly sell his filing cabinet, desk, chairs, even his pick-up truck, however their agent suggested that she find details of any service contracts or guarantees.
She had rarely set foot in his workshop. She never had any business there. She tried several keys before she found one that would let her in. There was a small, sad heap of mail on the other side of the door. The tools, kept spotless and well-oiled, hung on nails along one wall. There was an Easter cactus, thriving on neglect, an out-of-date calendar on which a topless model caressed a chain saw and a cheque from Charlie for ten thousand pounds, torn in two and framed. A thin layer of dust, the very image of redundancy, was already coating every surface. Dora spread her coat inside out across a chair to protect her clothes then began to work her way through the contents of the filing cabinet, picking out relevant papers and tossing everything else into a bin liner at her side.
Either Lawrence or John Docherty had been neat and methodical. Each client had their own file containing correspondence and details of contracts and purchases. There was a file of invoices, a file of tax receipts and a file of all papers relating to the truck. There was also a file of guarantee slips. It was simple enough to check them off against the tools on the wall and the ones still in the back of the truck. He bought most of his equipment through the same trade supplier whose sales invoices, marked up with the buyer’s name and address, were clearly printed with Please Retain Proof of Purchase as Warranty-see over, note 4, for terms and conditions. Many of the purchases had passed their guarantee period but the chain saw in the rear of the truck was apparently still covered. Then she noticed that the serial number on the chain saw failed to match the one written on the sales docket. She searched high and low and even rang John to check, but there was no second chain saw and no paperwork relating to the one she had found.
Heart racing, she locked up speedily and drove to the police station with saw and docket on the seat beside her. She was seen by the duty officer who promptly offered her a cup of tea, seeing the state she was in, and sent for Detective Inspector Faithe. Dora had not forgotten Faithe, a stocky woman with greying hair, a scarred cheek and a stare Dora felt could penetrate to the labels on one’s underwear.
‘It’s only a thought,’ Dora stammered, when she had explained how she had come by the things, ‘but I remembered how the saw or one like this, was linked to … to what you found in Wumpett Woods. If they write names and addresses on their sales dockets, then presumably they keep copies and presumably if this saw isn’t my son’s it might belong to … I mean, with the serial number they could give you a name …’
There was indeed a name and an address and an arrest and a confession and a rapid, shamefaced trial. Charlie Knights had not needed to confess. He had been a client, after all, and there was no proof that Lawrence had not stolen the saw from him. He had no idea, either, that there was no longer conclusive forensic evidence linking this specific tool rather than an identical model, to the sawing up of the body. Guilt had proved an intolerable companion, however, and it was with deep sighs of relief that he told Faithe how he had killed his mistress, Carla Rushton, in a blind rage when she had announced that she was sleeping with someone else and thinking of marrying him because Charlie would not wed her. He had driven her body to Wumpett, dismembered it, broken its teeth with a rock, thrown it into a trench and set it alight. Once it was burned beyond recognition he buried it. He had not planned any of this and was not thinking clearly. He had rubbed the chain saw over with handfuls of beech leaves wet with dew but, uncertain in the pre-dawn light how clean it was, he had thoughts of driving back via the Bross and hurling it into the deepest part of the river. He was calm enough to sense, however, that to have a chain saw disappear was more suspicious than to have it still hanging innocently in one’s workshop. If he drove home swiftly he might yet avoid being seen, then could clean it thoroughly at his leisure with bleach or disinfectant and further mask any traces with fresh oil.
It was pure chance that Charlie should have found Lawrence sleeping in the truck. Ducking out of sight, his initial panic was soothed by the memory that Lawrence had helped him buy just that saw when they were planning the arboretum because he had recently bought an identical one himself which was serving him well. It had not been his intention to frame his son-in-law, despise him as he might. The slumbering man, the unlocked truck door, were merely a perfect insurance policy thrown temptingly in his path. When he registered Bonnie as a missing person, he was not to know they had already found Carla Rushton’s anonymized body and were looking for identifying clues.
The judge sentenced him to life imprisonment. His free confession, she said, and his guilty plea might have mitigated in his favour had he not been so cold-bloodedly content to see another man pilloried for what he had done.
Bonnie remained in America. She was under doctor’s orders to avoid stress. With her father’s consent, she instructed Dora to put his house and contents up for sale and to make large donations from the proceeds to cover the cost of a burial plot and headstone for Carla Rushton, whose family, if she had any, had not claimed her, and towards starting a women’s refuge in Barrowcester. Dora attended the trial on her behalf, leaning on Hecate Murray’s moral support and observing bitterly that the press seemed far less interested in the truth than they had been in disseminating a calumny. Hecate urged Dora to call a press conference to draw attention to the affair and right the balance in Lawrence’s favour, but she and Darius recoiled at the idea. Because of the guilty plea, it was soon over. She could not bring herself to look at the accused but Hecate assured her afterwards that he had faced his punishment with proper dignity and had stolen ‘speaking glances’ at Dora throughout.
Her love for Charlie was a fresh thing, as vigorous as any new growth. Even unavowed and shrouded in silence, it refused to wither all at once. When he was arrested and she was called to make fresh statements to Detective Inspector Faithe, she felt nauseous at the conflict within her, at the dreadful knowledge t
hat her own zealously meddling hand had set the machinery of retribution in motion. Were it possible, she wondered, would she now not contact the police? She could not unknow new knowledge, but she was shocked at how little disgust she felt at what Charlie had done. She knew him. She had made love to him. She continued to remember the smell of his chest when she had lain in his arms and continued to wear the necklace he had fastened about her. He was a murderer now, there was proof and she had to believe it, but he was also a man who loved her, so she could not think him a monster. Carla Rushton was nothing to her, merely a name and a reputation, a sad postscript of a person. Only sitting in Barrowcester High Court, clutching at Hecate’s dry little hand as the forensic details were read out, did it come home to her that the man in whose bed she had blithely slept had cut a person up.
Lawrence’s card had given her no address so she wrote to him care of the elderly couple who had taken him under their wing in California, in the hope that they could forward her letter to wherever he had gone. She sent him the few clippings the trial gave rise to. Justice had a harsh, metallic taste and nothing could compensate him for the public exposure his wretched marriage had received or the savage loss but she hoped that it might at least help him in whatever new beginning he was attempting. She still missed Bonnie. Hecate was wayward and amusing and absorbed a great deal of time and emotion but she was more sister than daughter to her.
When his house and belongings were sold, Dora adopted Charlie’s two Dobermans rather than have them put down or given to an animal shelter. In her mind, soulful Megan and foolish Rex were the better part of him. She had never owned dogs before and it amused her to have two such loyal creatures guard and follow her. She let them sleep on her bedroom sofa at night. Ignorant of any sentimental motive, Hecate approved wholeheartedly of what she saw only as a noble gesture.
‘Dogs are higher beings than us,’ she maintained. ‘They know no malice. They teach us how to live.’