by Patrick Gale
‘Not really. Only. Oh. It’s stupid … You were saying. Sorry.’
‘I was going to say I hope you haven’t broken off with Lucas too.’
‘I have sort of. I couldn’t believe his nerve, coming to the funeral like that.’
‘Oh, was he there? Those pills were strong! Sophie, I wasn’t going to tell you but now I’d better. It was me.’
‘What was?’
Lady Droxford sat in the chair again. ‘I realized Charlie was still in touch with him,’ she said. ‘I’d guessed because of the way Antony was acting. So morose all through the holiday in Sicily, after the opera debacle, then suddenly so manic and overexcitable when term began again. Then, quite by chance, I was calling by that afternoon. I love Illumina. I never miss it. Never missed it. It was always the start of Christmas for me. So I’d come over to do a little shopping and hand-post some cards and I was going to see a friend for tea then go with her but she was in bed with flu so nothing doing.’
Unnerved perhaps at having Sophie’s stare so intensely upon her, she stood again and started walking about as she talked.
‘I thought I’d take Antony by surprise. And I saw that stupid oaf of a boy going in through the garden gate ahead of me. I didn’t know what to do at first. I should have called out, I suppose. Stopped him that way. But I dithered so when I eventually went in they were … I mean I heard them.’ She glanced out of the window, away from Sophie’s gaze. ‘It was too late. I was so angry.’ She looked back at her. ‘You have no idea.’
‘With Antony?’
‘No. With that … That ridiculous schoolboy! I left the house in such a state. They hadn’t seen me and I half-thought I was just going to fetch the car and drive home but instead I called in on Dr Twyford. His wife’s an old friend so I know him quite well but I got it so wrong. What I wanted to do was save Antony from the boy. Blame the boy. Say he was laying siege to him or something. But I was angry and you know how it is when you’re angry, you lose control of your words rather, and before I knew it Johnny Twyford was marching over there to catch them.’
She had paced to the low window and now stared out, paddling nervously at the thin curtain with her fingertips.
‘They say a mother’s love is blinder than most and I suppose mine was. I honestly thought it was just a mad infatuation and that a quick, sharp shock would be enough to bring him to his senses. A case of desperate remedies. I knew nothing could be proved and that the last thing anyone would do was involve the police but I thought to lose his job or be forced to take his sabbatical early would be better than, oh, what did I think? I didn’t think!’ She drew the curtain sharply across and turned back to look at Sophie. ‘I had no idea his feelings for him ran so deep.’
Her voice cracked and for a terrible moment Sophie thought she was going to break down. But Lady Droxford controlled herself with a deep breath and a sigh.
‘Of course it wasn’t just Charlie,’ she muttered. ‘It was his feelings for the school. He couldn’t live without the bloody place.’
Sophie was so taken aback she had no idea what to say.
‘What’ll you do?’ she asked at last.
‘Bless you. I shall go on. I shall quietly crumble. I’ve been thinking of shutting up shop and going to Corrie. It’s a sort of female lay community in Dorset. Perfect for stupid, meddlesome old trouts who need to make amends. They’ll be glad of my money and Julius can move his mother-in-law into the dower house.’
‘He didn’t know,’ Sophie said. ‘Mr … Antony didn’t. I spoke to him just before he … He thought it was Lucas. That’s why I –’
Lady Droxford interrupted her. She was all alertness again, jolted out of her sad distraction. ‘Does Lucas know?’
‘Well, yes. I was so angry I told him after the funeral.’
‘Can you go to him now?’
‘It’s a bit late. Margaret’ll –’
‘Please, Sophie. Go and tell him? I couldn’t bear it if …’ Her fine old face began to crumple.
Sophie darted forward, leaving the binoculars which she had been cradling. ‘Of course,’ she told her, understanding at last. ‘I’ll go now. I’ll go on my bike. And thank you.’ She kissed her cheek, marvelling at its softness. ‘Er … Veronica … You have to sign yourself out in the book.’
‘I’ll sign myself out. Go on. Go!’
Sophie ran out through the kitchen. ‘Back soon,’ she told Margaret. ‘Sorry. I’ll be very quick.’
She snatched her bike from the shed but it had flat tyres so she hurled it aside and grabbed someone else’s, a boy’s one, and rode it as fast as she could across town. She laboured up Tinker’s Hill, flat-soled shoes repeatedly slipping off the pedals so that she crashed painfully onto the crossbar.
The Hanukkah candles were lit in the big hall window so she knew they hadn’t gone skiing yet. She was so breathless when she reached the Behrmans’ drive she could hardly speak.
Heidi seemed to catch her urgency off her and dropped her usual routine of offering coffee and biscuits.
‘Sorry, Sophie. He’s visiting a friend.’
‘Oh. Who?’
‘Nick, was it? No. Dick! That’s it. He said he was visiting Dick. He goes over there quite often these days but hasn’t brought him over here yet. Why look so worried? Sophie?’
‘It’s nothing. It’s fine,’ Sophie assured her, turning her bike. ‘Dick’s great. Bye, Heidi. Gotta go. Bye.’
At least the route from the Behrmans’ house to the river was downhill all the way. She freewheeled, becoming chilled to the marrow because, in her hurry, she had run from the house without a coat or hat. There were no lights on the bike. Several drivers honked at her.
The lights in the cottage were sinisterly dim, yellowish. She let the bike fall with a clatter on the path and raced in, not caring if she was running in on an orgy.
He was on his back on the filthy floor, his white polo-neck splashed with the blood that was pooling around his hair. Wilf was standing over him, desperate.
‘Get up!’ he was urging. ‘It’s okay now. You can get up. I’m sorry I –’ Startled, he spun round and saw her. ‘I didn’t mean to,’ he started. ‘But he said he’d –’
‘Get out,’ she said. ‘It’s me you should have hit.’
‘Soph?’
‘Just get out.’ She shoved him hard so that he staggered clear of Lucas. ‘Lucas? Lou?’ she shouted, dipping to the floor. She touched his legs. He cried out and she heard Wilf hurry out. ‘Don’t move,’ she said. ‘I’m getting help. Okay?’
She sprinted to the nearest phone box, called an ambulance, then, with her only silver coin, rang Heidi. Luckily it was Simon who answered, calmness personified, and he agreed to bring Heidi to meet them in the hospital. She only told him Lucas had been in an accident.
When she reached him again, Lucas had stood, walked as far as the doorway then slumped to the floor.
‘Idiot,’ she said. ‘I told you not to move, but at least your legs aren’t bust.’
‘Sorry,’ he mumbled and she saw that somewhere under the blood he was trying to smile.
‘I’ve told your dad to meet us in Casualty,’ she said. ‘I didn’t say where you were. Visiting Dick! You’re the end, Lou.’
He mumbled again, slowly reached up to remove a tooth.
‘Jesus!’ she said, wincing. ‘It was my fault.’
He shook his head and mumbled what might have been, ‘Teamwork.’
She put an arm across his shoulder but he cried out again and she pulled back. ‘Sorry,’ she said and planted a careful kiss on the shoulder nearest her. ‘Sorry, Lou.’
She held his hand in the ambulance, talking to him but now getting only faint squeezes in return.
‘I know it wasn’t you,’ she told him. ‘Lucas? I know it wasn’t. I’m sorry. I saw his mother. Lady Droxford told the Headman. Compton jumped to conclusions and … Lou? Stay with me. Squeeze my hand if you can hear me. Good boy. Nearly there. You’ll be fine. You’ll see.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Heidi said when Simon had made her drink some water and she was calmer. ‘How did you know where to go? Who is this Dick he’s started seeing?’
‘No one,’ Sophie said. ‘It’s a code to let me know … There was a place he liked to go. To be alone. By the river.’
‘Hardly safe after dark,’ Simon said and Sophie wondered how much his legal work had taught him about the city’s seamier side.
‘I know who did it,’ she told him.
‘You know them?’ Heidi was shocked.
‘William Franks. Wilf. I … He was in the home with me. He’s my boyfriend. He was.’
‘But why …?’ Simon gestured towards the curtain that was hiding Lucas from them.
‘Jealous,’ she said. ‘I’d split up with him today and he thought …’
‘Will you tell this to the police when they come?’
‘Of course. And his address. Whatever they want.’
Sophie hoped she had told them just enough to give them a story they could work with. There was no shame in a son beaten by a jealous rival in love.
The three of them lapsed into shocked silence. There was a fairly steady stream of admissions. The last Saturday before Christmas was working its spell. Some of them were in far worse shape than Lucas.
Suddenly a nurse was at their side.
‘You can see him very briefly,’ she said. ‘But he was concussed so you’d better just say hi-bye, okay? We’ve given him a shot for the pain and we’ll need him in overnight to keep an eye on him. Two cracked ribs, a front tooth gone, bruised legs and a black eye. He must have had the sense not to fight back. He got off lightly, trust me.’
They jumped up to go over, Sophie with them, but Heidi turned to block her way, her face as hard as her voice.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Not you.’
‘But –’
‘You’ve done enough.’
‘Sophie found him, darling,’ Simon murmured reasonably.
‘She’s done enough. Stay away from him.’
As Heidi followed the nurse, Simon muttered what might have been an apology, then noticed the police arriving and seized the welcome diversion.
Sophie stood where she was just long enough to catch a glimpse of Lucas, bare chest tightly bandaged, neck in a brace, then Heidi twitched the green curtains across and he was lost to her. She introduced herself to the police and made a careful statement. She told no lies. She told them about Wilf’s anger when she had turned him down, gave them his name and address and offered herself as a witness. Her only manipulation of the facts was to say she had found him on the riverside beside the public conveniences rather than in them.
‘I’m sorry,’ Simon said, shaking her hand. ‘Heidi’s mind once made up … But thank you for finding him and …’
‘That’s all right.’
In the weeks that followed Christmas she kept expecting Lucas to contact her but he didn’t. Possibly he recovered soon enough for Heidi and Simon to take him to Switzerland as planned. She heard nothing further from the police so assumed charges against Wilf were not pursued. When she called at Jago’s on the last day of the holidays to collect her books for Lent term she picked up a copy of the new Short Roll and found that both Lucas and Charlie had left the school.
Encouraged by Kimiko, she wrote to him at Tinker’s Hill, confident that Heidi did not read or steal her son’s mail as Christine Somborne-Abbot did. Eventually she received a long, funny letter back. He was in New York, living with Heidi’s older brother’s family and enrolled in the same High School as his cousins. He was having a ball. He was making new friends he so wanted her to meet. She must come on a visit, he wrote.
Relieved, she wrote back at more length but his reply took weeks and was full of people she didn’t know, all of them female apparently, and shiny with an urban sophistication she couldn’t match.
As exams once more threatened to engulf them both, her friendship with Kimiko bloomed into warm affection and they studied with the cloistered dedication of nuns. The correspondence with Lucas dwindled from long occasional letters to shorter, rarer ones then to mere, witty bulletins on seasonal postcards. After a while, stung at receiving a particularly thin response to her latest effort, she decided to test him by writing nothing back and seeing how long it took him to contact her again.
After two months of silence, her nerve failed her and she wrote him a six-side letter, closely spaced and straight from the heart, rich with details of her life without him and honest nostalgia for the experiences they had shared. She dared, towards its end, to confess her early fantasy in which the two of them ended up living together but sophisticatedly apart under one roof, shared cats, fridge and all.
The New York post office returned it with an official stamp to say he was now unknown at the only address she had for him. She kept the letter, at first because she had thoughts of sending it to Tinker’s Hill for forwarding and then because, without her noticing the alteration, it had become a precious relic of her giddy youth.
LENT TERM
(forty-one)
Sophie arranged the tulips in a vase; rather she put them in one. Her approach to flower-arranging had long been to buy enough flowers to more or less fill a vase’s mouth, trim them to the same length then stick them in, let go then give the whole thing a gentle shake to settle it before adding water. It was hardly Constance Spry but it worked for her.
Yellow parrot tulips. One of those extravagances Jack wouldn’t notice as such because he had no idea of the cost of flowers. She fancied they looked Hockneyish, although the setting, with its dark oak panelling and antiques lent by Jack’s family, made every attempt at ornament look like a poor stab at a Dutch still-life.
She glanced at the kitchen clock and swore. She had a heap of Latin proses she had intended to mark in the gap between her ten o’clock first-year class and now but time had evaporated and they would have to wait.
Lunch was entirely a cheat. Neither Jack nor she had ever learnt to cook with any confidence. When they first met they were both postgraduates, living out of canteens, college pantries and, when they got lucky, at high tables. Once they were married his sister bought them a microwave and for a while their every meal had right angles. Then they both took jobs at their old school and were able more or less to live off school meals between snacks, especially with the dining privileges that came with Sophie’s becoming Master of Schola. Recently however their lives had been transformed by an enterprising young couple taking on the post office and reinventing it as a French-style delicatessen, selling servings of freshly made dishes as well as mere ingredients. Sophie and Jack had been paying back old hospitality debts ever since.
She carried the tulips into the dining room. Jack had been distracted, halfway through laying the table, by a lost book found and was stretched in the spring sunshine on the window seat, reading.
‘Oh,’ he said as she fetched wine glasses. ‘Sorry.’ He turned a page.
‘They’ll be here soon,’ she said. ‘Don’t you have to change for the christening?’
‘I’m only in the organ loft.’
‘You’ll still have to shake hands. They’ll have a record token to give you or something over sherry afterwards.’
‘Hell. I’m sorry I can’t join you for lunch.’
‘You love TatCoFo.’
He grinned. ‘I do, rather.’
‘Just see there are no deaths, okay? Go on. Change. Go.’
She plucked the book from his hand and he lumbered off in search of a presentable suit. She followed him to leave his book on the stairs so he should find it again. The Lady in Medieval England. Huh, she thought, glancing at the title, That’s
me, and felt a small surge of love for him.
He was the ideal staff member – organist, sportsman, amateur lepidopterist (founder of the school’s latest club, Moth Soc) as well as an historian; far more of an all-rounder than she was. This was one of the reasons they had managed to coincide at Tatham’s without becoming acquainted. He was also wonderfully attuned to her needs. If they were driving somewhere and Wagner came on the radio, he had a way of flicking to another channel, making a quiet show of wanting to hear some news. He even changed channels when it wasn’t Wagner but nearly, like Bruckner or Liszt. But even he, whom she loved more than anyone, did not know that she sometimes woke in the night with a sweet, sweaty smell in her nostrils and a headful of horror. He was a heavy sleeper and she would slide from the bed without waking him; the smell of his bed-warmed skin, normally a delight to her, made her feel worse at such times. Had he woken, he would have found her in a small, rather hard chair in her study, reading something soothingly remote, in the original. Vitruvius on hypocausts was especially effective.
He ran downstairs again, suited, tugging up a tie, organ music flapping under one elbow. ‘People are starting to arrive,’ he said in passing, ‘and there are some aliens who must be your pals.’
‘I’ll leave you something to eat in the kitchen,’ she told him. ‘We might go for a walk as it’s so nice.’
‘Fine.’
He thundered down the wooden stairs and she crossed to the sitting room to look down. She saw him run lankily across Flint Quad to the vestry door, saluting the anxious Chaplain as he went. The Chaplain was standing by the Chapel’s doors to greet the baby’s arriving family and supporters. Sophie leaned against the glass, watching with interest, then spotted her guests. Amidst the drift of black-gowned Scholars milling towards Hall for lunch, they did indeed look like aliens, or even angels, trying to pass for human. On second glance she saw they weren’t really all in white, it was only a trick, the contrast between their pale coats and white shirts with their deep tans.
She tapped on the glass and they looked up. The sash was jammed with paper to stop it rattling so she couldn’t call out as she wanted to. She ran downstairs then remembered that, outwardly at least, she was forty-one and a housemistress. She threw open the door.