by Patrick Gale
‘Neither did I. How we’ve both surprised ourselves.’
‘Why didn’t you marry when you first came back to England?’ he asked. ‘You’re an attractive woman.’
She smiled to herself.
‘So I’ve heard,’ she said then she sighed. ‘But even lovesick men used to think twice about taking on another man’s son, legitimate or no.’
‘So you made do with married blokes?’
‘I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Bonnie dropped a hint or two.’
‘The little cow.’ Dora unclicked and closed her handbag clasp. ‘And I thought I was so discreet.’
‘I’d have had you like a flash years ago.’
‘Ssh!’
‘You know I would.’
‘Yes but there was Carla Rushton.’
‘She paled beside you.’
‘Nonsense. I’m sure she was …’
‘Marry me, Dora.’
‘No.’
‘Please.’
‘Now you’re being ridiculous.’
‘No one need know.’
‘Why? What possible– ?’
‘Bonnie won’t have anything more to do with me now, I know that. Before the baby’s born she’ll divorce Lawrence and marry Craig. I’d see you well provided for. I’ve no use for the money. Not now.’
‘I’m very comfortable, thank you.’
‘Yes but – I’d just like to know that you were there.’
‘Well I am here.’
‘You know what I mean. We could do it here. The chaplain could marry us. It happens more often than you think.’
‘Then you get out in twenty-five years’ in time to join me in some tasteful sheltered housing development of Darius’s. No thanks.’
‘Please.’
‘No, Charlie. Let’s talk about– ’
‘I love you, Dora.’
‘You can’t do. Not really.’
‘I love you. You’re all I think about. I lie in my bunk at night and stare at the moon through that tiny window.’
‘Spare me.’
‘And I think of you.’
‘You’re becoming fixated. Stop it.’
This was one of those rare occasions when she felt keenly the lack of a mother. Dora smiled at the thought of how mortified hers would have been by what she was about to do. Hearing tyres on the gravel, she snatched up her bag and hurried down with the dogs at her heels, keen to avoid a meeting between Darius, Reuben and Hecate Murray. She had given her strict instructions to dress as though this were simply another afternoon of prison visiting but, knowing Hecate, she would have splashed out on some ill-judged finery that would give the game away and incur an inquisition.
Dora flung open the front door and waved to Hecate who, as she had feared, was wearing a corsage and a pink hat with netting on it.
‘Hang on,’ she barked, meaning ‘stay in the car,’ then walked briskly round to the pond to say goodbye to Darius and Reuben and ask them to keep Rex and Megan with them so Rex didn’t chase the car into the lane.
‘You look smart,’ said Reuben sleepily, rubbing Megan’s ears.
‘Why are you so dressed up?’ Darius asked.
‘This old thing? I just wanted something a little fresh. They see so few nicely dressed women, poor things. You don’t think it’s too much?’
‘I think it’s a treat for them,’ Darius assured her. ‘Where’s St Joan?’
‘In the car. Leave her alone. Bye, darlings. I’ll be back by six.’
‘I’m cooking,’ Reuben said. ‘So you don’t have a thing to do.’
‘How sweet of you. Help yourselves to tea and gin and things. Bye.’
Hecate leaned across to open the passenger door for her. When Dora fastened her seat belt, Hecate kissed her on the cheek in the solemn way she had that made Dora feel they were initiates in some secret society.
It was a rather charming ceremony in the tiny prison chapel. Charlie had arranged for flowers to be delivered – sprays of lilies, mock orange blossom and pink roses. Hecate was matron of honour and the other witness was Jeff, the merchant navy cell-mate, a gentle, tattooed giant with sad eyes who shook Dora’s hand as though it were made of snow and smiled at Hecate so warmly she blushed to her roots. They were married in the eyes of church and state, using the wedding ring Dora had worn fraudulently for years. Charlie gave her one, deep, startling, pepperminty kiss before the warders stepped forward to lead him and Jeff away. Dora had to sit down a moment to recover her composure while Hecate prayed stoutly beside her. Then the chaplain led them both back to the bald sunlight of the outside world. At Hecate’s request, he assured them he would see that at least one of the floral arrangements found its way up to the bridegroom’s cell.
‘An honest woman at last,’ said Dora in the car park, as she opened the half-bottle of champagne Hecate had kindly brought in a chiller bag. ‘Cheers.’
‘Praise His name!’
‘Phooey.’
‘Will you tell Bonnie?’
‘I’m not telling a soul and neither are you.’
‘Cross my heart. It does seem sad, though. I mean, no reception, no presents, no honeymoon.’
‘All three greatly overrated. No more of this for you or you’ll wrap us round a tree on the way home.’
Darius was alone in the kitchen when she came in. He was diligently peeling and slicing potatoes. Apparently Reuben had received a telephone call from his agent with a commission to write the authorized biography of the singer who had died so shockingly on the cruise.
‘He’s rushed into town to hunt for her recordings in the music shop to get him in the mood. It’s quite a coup. She died with a huge following. Just the career boost he needs.’
‘Good.’
She pecked his cheek, hoping he would not smell champagne on her breath. She had sucked fruit pastilles all the way home till her tongue was sore.
‘So he’s left me to make a start on dinner. It’s rather rich. A creamy, mustardy, lamb thing. Do you mind?’
‘Sounds lovely.’
‘You know his book will have to mention Lawrence in the last chapter?’
‘Of course. He was with her when she disappeared.’
‘And they were, well, involved rather by then.’
‘I didn’t realize. But I’m sure Reuben will do it all as tastefully as possible.’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m very glad, you know.’
‘Are you?’
‘He’s a dear. I don’t know why it took you so long.’
‘Me neither. Perhaps it’s our early mistakes that help define the tightness of our later choices. Drink?’
‘Not just yet.’
‘There was some more post after you went. It’s in the hall. There’s … There’s a letter from America.’
‘From Bonnie?’
‘Actually I think it must be from Lawrence.’
In the hall, Dora brushed the other letters aside and picked up the airmail one. It was from Lawrence and this time he gave a return address. In Kentucky. Stunned, she opened the garden door and walked outside to enjoy it in privacy. The cathedral bells were ringing in the distance, presumably after someone’s wedding, and the still afternoon air was criss-crossed by swifts which swooped across the pond after newly hatched flies. On the far side of the lawn, the bantams ran loud, ungainly races after beetles on the floor of their run.
Dear Ma, he wrote, Sorry to take so long to reply. You must have thought I had died. You know me and writing. Never my strong point. But there is always the telephone so there’s been no real excuse except sadness and fear and general uselessness. The longer I left it the more difficult the idea of hearing your voice down the line seemed to be. Almost – sorry! – like talking to someone in Heaven. Also I didn’t know what to think about Charlie. I still don’t. And that stopped me writing or whatever for a bit. It all seems so far away from here, almost as if it belongs to the past and is no longer important. Thanks fo
r all those newspaper cuttings, by the way, and for dealing with the salerooms over my stuff.
Another reason I never wrote was because I was never sure how long I would be staying. I kept thinking I might move on, might come home, no point in writing now etc etc. And now so much has happened and so much time has passed. But that’s enough apologizing or you’ll run out of patience and I’ll run out of paper!
I’ve had two jobs, working for someone else this time. For a year, nearly, I was the forester – actually a glorified groundsman – in an amazing hotel called Cliff Ranch, at Big Sur. It was very quiet and remote and beautiful. I think Lucy would have liked it. Like all the staff, I had my own cabin in the woods. I think most of us were there because we were escaping from something or getting over something but no one said that aloud. I felt at home there right away.
I saw Bonnie. Quite by chance. Here some word beginning with M was crossed out. Craig had designed the place and brought her there on a visit. I didn’t see him. Just her. Don’t worry. I behaved myself. We had a long talk. She tries to blame herself for Lucy. I told her not to but I doubt it did any good. If she wants a divorce, she can have it, but she hasn’t asked yet.
Now I’ve moved to the other side of the country. A guest at Cliff Ranch, an amazing woman, very rich, called Serena Merle, actually headhunted me to run her estate in Kentucky. There’s her and her little boy, Humphrey, and Willa the nanny (who’s local and can tell fortunes with coffee grounds) and Laurie and me. We’re like family together. We all live in the same house and eat at the same table. We get to ride the horses as well as care for them. Humphrey is great. Rather serious but very sweet. Reminds me of Lucy sometimes. I miss her so much you know. She haunts my dreams. Poor Ma. I bet you miss her just as badly. No one ever talks about bereaved grandparents but of course they suffer too.
‘Bless you for that,’ thought Dora.
I should have explained: Laurie worked at the Cliff Ranch too. Laurie Petersen. I know this sounds strange coming from me but she’s my Best Friend – just like people were meant to have in school. Don’t get excited. She’s not my girlfriend or anything like that. We just clicked straight away. Like missing parts of the same jigsaw. If Serena hadn’t come along, Laurie and I would be travelling around together like a pair of hobos. She reminds me of you – don’t be cross – not so much to look at but when she’s impatient with me …
Dora cursed the disorderly thinness of his narrative, desperate for details.
She’s the one in the pictures. Looks like me, I think you’ll agree, so people tease us about being long-lost twins. Of course she’s not my twin, she’s very American. But she was born in central California, like me, before her parents adopted her and took her to San Francisco. And she climbs trees barefoot better than I ever could!
Dora stopped reading to pull out the handful of photographs still in the envelope. There was a cabin beneath massive trees and a view of a sunset with an indistinct figure, possibly Lawrence, waving. The third caused her to sit heavily on the tree seat. It showed Lawrence and a woman, arms round one another’s shoulders, sitting on a white painted fence with some beautiful horses behind them. The first shock was that Lawrence was tanned, had cut his hair very short and was smiling as he had scarcely done since he was a little boy. The second was the woman. She was his height and build exactly, slim-hipped, small-breasted, her hair cropped like his, a silver star on a leather thong about her neck, vivid against her honeyed skin. Hair and jodhpurs aside, she was the very image of Dora at that age, Dora picnicking with Darius in the sand dunes at Studland Bay with a wildly happy little boy between them.
It was her daughter. She had no doubt of it. The un-named girl baby she had barely held and kissed before the midwife placed Lawrence in her arms and took his sister off to another room and another life. With another, better prepared, married and certainly older mother. In their first weeks at the Ahwahnee, the doctor had made an inspection and confirmed it would be twins. Dora had panicked at the thought. How would she ever cope? They would wear her out! Leave her penniless! She half hoped the prospect of such a burden on their cast-off daughter might cause her parents to relent. Her mother had agreed with her. Twins were too great a burden. She had not relented however. If they both lived, she must give one up at birth, the girl if there was one. She wrote to a discreet adoption agency on Dora’s behalf to arrange matters in advance. She wrote on hotel notepaper, naturally, using an assumed name lifted from a suitably sordid novel in the hotel library.
Dora turned back to the photograph, staring at it so closely that her eyes ached and began to water. Hecate would have praised her friend Jesus. Dora merely sat back on the bench, her head against the rough bark of the walnut tree, and closed her eyes as she squeezed the letter and photographs against her empty belly. Should she tell him, she wondered. Should she raise spectres and secrets and demand blood tests and ugly proofs? Surely all that mattered was that Laurie – so strangely named in harmony with her brother – was alive and happy and reunited with her other half? She determined to say nothing to Darius but to raise the matter with Hecate when they next spent time together. Already the mute repository of one great secret, her friend could easily accommodate a second.
She read the last few sentences in a daze, having to reread phrases her eyes had scanned but her mind had not taken in.
I think you’d like Serena. She’s calm, like her name, and dry and rather sexy (!). Would you be very disturbed if I took up with an older woman? I think maybe that’s what I’ve needed all these years. Men grow up so much later than women and some of us, Serena is always pointing out, never catch up with them at all. She says to ask you to visit. (She’s sitting nearby with Humphrey as I write. In fact me writing at last was her idea.) Would you like that? Come in the autumn to see the trees turn colour. Do write soon. And come and stay. I mean that. Then he signed off, as he never had before, Much love, and to Darius, from Larry. There were two kisses.
Feverishly, she shook another photograph from the envelope. It was taken on a blue verandah with wicker seats and bushes in pots. Laurie and Lawrence sat on either side of a skinny black woman who held a toddler on her lap. All were laughing except for the toddler, who looked furious. Looking closer, Dora made out the reflection in the window behind them of a fourth adult, the elusive Serena surely, taking the photograph. She was tall, wore a dark dress and had a straw hat on. Dora could see little of her face but the figure intrigued her, the strength in its arms, the solidity of its pose. It was so typically maddening of him to trail a clue to something desperately interesting right at the end of a letter then to break off as though he had simply lost concentration and wandered out of the room.
She re-read the letter, scanning for clues. Lawrence had set up house with three women; a smokescreen worthy of her own ingenuity over the years. If he had indeed taken up with a rich, older woman, she found that she, who had just married a known murderer, could embrace the situation with benign equanimity, such was her welling relief at his happiness. She liked the sound of this Serena – even if the witch had seduced her blundering son. She had always liked the sound of Kentucky, too; more Irish than American. She would talk to Darius about her finances. Perhaps she could afford an autumn trip and even take an internal flight to call in on Craig and Bonnie. For fairness’ sake. If they’d have her. She could picture herself with the mysteriously potent Serena on the blue verandah, drinking afternoon Manhattans and watching Lawrence and Laurie exercising horses in a paddock in the golden autumn light.
She heard a car swing up the drive, then Reuben’s light voice greeting Darius, and hastily stuffed the photographs back into the envelope. These were revelations and possibilities she wanted to cherish alone at her leisure. A few minutes later, the young man emerged from the house, his jaunty walk expressing as always his extraordinary confidence. He carried a small shrub in a pot.
‘It’s a white lilac,’ he said. ‘I remembered you saying how much you’d like one in the corner by the
bench there. It’s not very big, I know, but they grow quite fast apparently.’
‘How sweet of you.’ Deeply touched at this small but significant gesture, unconsciously so well timed, she stood to kiss his cheek. ‘An unbirthday present. Let’s take it over there now. I might even dig it in before supper so it has a nice cool night for settling its roots in. It’s going to be boiling tomorrow.’
She took the plant from him and they followed the path around to where an old stone bench stood diagonally across the corner where the evening sun warmed the old walls.
‘Perfect,’ she said. ‘If I plant it right there, behind the bench, it can form a lovely scented canopy.’
‘Your bower.’
‘Exactly,’ she said, and laughed, squeezing his hand.
He left her so that he might stop Darius spoiling the lamb. She took off her elegant heels and stepped into the battered gardening shoes she kept in the greenhouse, then dug a hole. She forked in compost and a little dried blood and bonemeal and poured a bucket of water into the packed cavity. Waiting for it to soak in, she looked about her and noticed how heavily the fruit trees had brought forth after the brutal pruning Lawrence had meted out. Laxtons. Worcester Pearmains. Conference pears. Victoria plums. She would have enough to leave boxes of windfalls outside the gate for passers-by. She thought of Charlie in his cell with the heady scent of lily and smelled again the rose she had held back from the bouquet to place in her button hole. She thought of Bonnie with Craig and beautiful Laurie with Lawrence – or Larry as he now was – with mystic Willa, wealthy Serena and the sweet, solemn baby. She heard laughter from the kitchen and pictured Reuben leaning his chin on Darius’s shoulder. Sixteen months ago she believed her small, fragile family damaged beyond repair and now, though further flung, it was twice the size and encompassing her with a more secure shelter than it ever had. She prised the lilac free of its plastic pot, teased out its roots and rested it into the moist, nutritious hole.
‘Burial brings new life,’ she thought, pressing the soil back about it with her ungloved hands. ‘How do we manage to go so awry, break so utterly apart and still find the strength to continue?’