Chapter Eight
The train from Prestatyn to Chester was crowded, and at first Lance had to stand. People crowded in, shuffling him farther down the car, until he was clinging to a strap above two girls about ten years old. As the swaying of the train swung him towards them, their mother told one to stand up and sat the other on her lap, and stared at Lance until he took the seat. He was clammy and breathless, and now the two girls made him feel as if there were a blaze on either side of him. The doctors were supposed to have shocked those feelings out of him, but even if he no longer wanted to imagine touching little girls, he still felt as if everyone around him thought he did. He closed his eyes and tried not to know where he was, but once the hem of the standing girl’s skirt brushed the back of his hand, and once her bare thigh touched him.
In Chester he sat hunched together until the car emptied, then he trudged out of the station, looking at nobody. He crossed the road into the old town, passed through the gate in the city wall and strolled along the Rows, the shopping walks boxed in by overhanging Tudor storeys. Strolling was no use: he couldn’t recall what he’d realised at the funeral.
His memory often let him down since he’d come out of the hospital. Sometimes he wondered how much of himself was lost, though it seemed not to matter. But he was sure this did, for he’d told himself so. Something that he’d seen or overheard at Queenie’s funeral had lit up like a flashbulb in his mind. He dawdled home beside the river, but the sight of lamps kindling on the bridge while their reflections trawled the water didn’t help. When he reached home at last, his father was waiting for him.
As soon as Lance let himself into the small flat that almost overlooked the river, his father levered himself to his feet, his arthritic hands gripping the arms of his chair that was turned to the window from which he’d been watching for Lance. He bumped the chair around toward the room and lowered himself carefully onto the seat, then he scrutinised Lance, his compact face expressionless but for the hint of a frown among the lines on his forehead. “You can get yourself some dinner if you haven’t eaten,” he said eventually. “I don’t feel like eating.”
He was making Lance feel as if he’d done something wrong and forgotten what it was. Lance found himself an apple in the fruit bowl next to the historeys of Chester between the Roman soldiers on the sideboard, and crunched it while his father wrote a letter to the museum he’d retired from. His father stared at his pen as the nib rested on a gathering blot, and then his head jerked up, flinging back his grey hair. “Well, how were my brother and his wife? What were they saying about me?”
Lance was expecting to be blamed for the torments of anxiety his father suffered whenever Lance was out of his sight. By the time he framed an answer his father was staring at him as if he were making it up. “Keith said he was sorry you weren’t there,” Lance told him doggedly, “and Edith was hoping the family could get together now.”
“Did you remember to say I was ill?”
Lance’s hand closed over his mouth, squeezing his beard. “Oh no, I forgot.”
“Hurrah, something else for them to lay at my door. My brother even denounced me for leaving home until he realised he could follow. I don’t know why you went at all. You couldn’t have believed any of them would be glad to see you.”
Lance could tell he was attacking himself under the guise of attacking Lance. “I wanted to see Auntie Queenie laid to rest,” he said.
“I can imagine how she must have bothered you. If we’d seen more of her you mightn’t have turned out the way you did.”
“Dad, can’t we just talk? I had something to ask you.”
His father let the writing pad slip to the floor and stared blankly at him. “Don’t you think I wish we could talk as we used to? I thought we’d have more time to share our lives when I retired. I was looking forward to strolling with you by the river on evenings like this. Perhaps you don’t appreciate how finding that filth in your room turned everything you’d said to me into lies. Thank God your mother was dead by then and never knew what you’d been hiding.”
Lance had sometimes thought his mother suspected more about him than she admitted—that she had been watchful on his behalf. A memory gleamed in his father’s eyes until he blinked it away and said “No, this is wrong. We shouldn’t spend our last years together like this. You never would have ended up this way if we’d cared for you as we should have. Ask whatever you have to ask.”
By now Lance had forgotten, but his father was liable to act as if he were forgetting on purpose, especially recent memories. He managed to think of something else that had been troubling him. “Did granddad really lose his mind before he died?”
“You aren’t losing your mind. If there are gaps that’s the price you have to pay, and you should realise it could have been worse.”
“Yes, but did he?”
“Who says he did? What have they been saying?”
“Alison’s husband was saying he must have gone mad.”
“What the devil does he know about it? He wasn’t there, he isn’t even family. My father didn’t lose his mind, he lost his wife, and that’s like having part of yourself torn off. Maybe when your cousin’s husband loses someone he won’t be so eager to denigrate people’s grief.”
“I miss mother too,” Lance said awkwardly.
His father clasped his hands together and stared at his whitening knuckles. “I suppose you do. I apologise for saying what I said before. I’m sure that if she were here she’d intercede between us.”
Their talk had foundered in embarrassment. Lance retreated to his room, a windowless box in which furniture white as the walls crowded round the bed. Since he’d come out of hospital he often found that memories surfaced when he was close to sleep, but the memory of his grandfather wouldn’t give way to any other. Whatever Lance’s father said, Lance was convinced the old man hadn’t just been mourning. Throughout his last months he’d accused Queenie of not letting him go to his wife, of keeping him alive because she couldn’t bear to be without him. Richard and Keith had told him soothingly that he’d see his wife when it was time, but Lance thought that even they had been taken aback when their father had lingered for weeks on what the doctor told them was his deathbed.
One night Lance had heard him cry out so loudly he’d been sure it was the end, and had raced up to the room to find the old man lying twisted on the bed, shrivelled limbs huddled together, eyes wide and blank. Then the withered body had jerked like a puppet or someone lurching out of a dream. “Let me go, let me go,” the old man had begun to moan, a complaint he’d kept up for days until he died.
Queenie hadn’t let him rest even then. The family and the undertakers had managed to sneak the corpse away from her for embalming, but when she’d realised that the coffin was about to be closed for burial she’d rushed to the front of the church, arms outstretched, crying “He moved.” And he had: the mouth had fallen open as if in a last silent protest at being prevented from resting. Her footsteps must have shaken it open, Lance told himself, but he wished he could forget the episode, not only because it might be blocking what he wanted to remember.
That weekend he went walking by the river, first with his father, who grew impatient with him for not chatting, and then by himself. On Saturday a brass band gave a concert on the riverbank, on Sunday canoeists were braving the weir, but all this only distracted him. Whatever he was trying to remember, hadn’t it to do with Alison? If he could help her, perhaps that would make up for the way he used to think about her; perhaps she might even realise that she needn’t be wary of him. When he returned home he could tell that his father was suspicious of him for wanting to go out by himself.
On Monday he was able to be more alone, at work. He had been a clerical officer before his breakdown, but he’d come back as a filing clerk. Few of the married women would talk to him, and most of the men were shy of him, as if his slowness and forgetfulness might be infectious. Now he had the task of putting all the dormant files i
n order, tens of thousands of them in the long basement where shelves stretched almost from wall to wall and rose to the low dim ceiling. Bare bulbs dangled into dusty aisles so narrow that two people couldn’t even squeeze past each other, not that there was often anyone besides Lance. He was glad not to be upstairs, where he might be expected to answer the phone; since his spell in the hospital he had lost the confidence. But then how could he phone Alison?
He still couldn’t think why he should. Being unable to grasp the memory made his head feel stiff and cramped. Was it about Alison herself or someone close to her? He stood with a handful of files half off the shelf, trying to force his paralysed thoughts to take one more step, and then he started guiltily and moved to vacate the aisle.
But nobody was watching him. He must have imagined it, not only because he would have heard if someone had made her way to the end of the basement away from the door, but because the figure he’d thought he glimpsed had been half his size. The doctors couldn’t have quelled his imagination as thoroughly as they were supposed to, he thought uneasily, almost choking on the smell of old paper.
Yet it was that glimpse of a child which made him start awake that night, realising that he’d meant to speak to Alison about her little girl. It was important, he knew, but even the sense of being needed couldn’t part the fog of his slowness. Perhaps he would remember by the time he had Alison’s number. He couldn’t ask his father, and he had to wait until his father was taking a shower before he could call Hermione. Talking was so hard that when he managed to, he said too much. He told Hermione that he wanted to speak to Alison about her little girl.
He tried to pretend he’d meant something else, something about Queenie and her will. Surely that would make Alison call him, and by then he might know what he needed to tell her. His little niece needed his help; he was sure she did. As he waited for Alison to call he grew tense, unable to let memories form by themselves. Even next day at work, whenever he seemed to be close to remembering he felt as if someone was watching him from the shadowy end of the aisle. The homegoing crowds were a relief from the smell of stale paper. But when he arrived home his father was waiting grimly for him. “So you’re up to your old tricks,” his father said.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Don’t try to pretend you’ve forgotten that too. The quacks said they’d cured you, but I think they’ve made you worse.”
Lance felt his words slowing until he could barely speak. “I never did anything.”
“Nor will you while I’m able to prevent it. You didn’t anticipate that your cousin might call while you weren’t here, did you? If she really didn’t know what you wanted with her child she’s as great a fool as you are. I should have told her, and told her to alert the police.”
Lance felt as if events were conspiring to ensure he didn’t speak to Alison, and that made him nervous for the child, a nervousness that felt like being close to remembering. “What’s her number?” he said as his father stared incredulously. “I’ve got to talk to her. I’ll let you listen.”
“You won’t speak to her on my phone,” his father said, his voice rising, “or on any other while you’re under my roof, and I swear that on your mother’s grave.”
Lance felt as if his father was driving the memory further out of reach. “Then I’ll go and see her.”
“You’ll stay here or I’ll have you taken into custody.” When Lance stood up, his father lunged to catch him and fell back into his chair, panting. “Don’t you dare leave this flat. Don’t you dare touch that door.” He was shouting “Come back here to me” as Lance hurried downstairs.
What if he called the police? Lance made himself walk through the crowds instead of running, shrinking against walls rather than risk bumping into someone and drawing attention to himself. When he caught sight of himself in the window display of a children’s boutique, his beard poking out like a caricature of his chin, he wished he could cover his face with his hands.
The railway station was crowded. Lance sat with his back against the window of the car, lifting his shoulder to obscure his face, until he realised that the women seated opposite were whispering about him. He expected every moment to see policemen marching down the platform, searching for him on the train that was so weighed down it felt like his slowness made solid. At last it moved, but that didn’t shift his thoughts. He had been hoping that now he didn’t have to phone he would find it easier to think.
He had to change trains at Hooton. He dodged across the small station and found a newspaper to hide behind. He felt relatively safe all the way to Liverpool, since he had the train almost to himself. But when he changed platforms in the underground station, the platform for the train to Waterloo was deserted.
He walked to the end where the tunnel closed in and stared along the line. Beyond the point where the rails merged with the dark he saw a lamp surrounded by a cramped dim patch of brick. He felt as if he were hiding from the city of Liverpool overhead, the sounds of a speeding police car, a fire engine, a bottle thrown down an escalator. He leaned against the wall above the slope that led down to the mouth of the dark, and strained his ears for the sound of the train. He’d feel safer once he was bound for Queenie’s house.
It wasn’t Queenie’s house now, it was Alison’s. He shouldn’t need reminding she was dead when attending her funeral had been so difficult for him, knowing he was being watched whenever he was near Rowan. The family was still suspicious of him. He couldn’t blame them, but shouldn’t they have had their doubts about Queenie too? Nobody seemed to wonder why, if Queenie loathed children, she had made so much of Rowan.
He gasped as if someone had caught him by the shoulder. That was what he’d meant to say after the funeral. He didn’t know why it was important, but he was sure it was—perhaps important enough to make up for his life. He mustn’t try to think beyond it, or he might lose it. Someone would know what it meant once he spoke up. He was closing his mind around it when he realised he was being watched.
They had to let him call Alison. He was allowed to make one call. He turned reluctantly, feeling the slowness gather in his skull, threatening to stop his words short of his lips. But there were no policemen. The platform was deserted except for a girl of about Rowan’s age, who was staring at him.
He could read no expression in her pale eyes, yet when her gaze met his he shrank inside himself. He felt as if she knew all about him—as if she knew that once he would have imagined touching her. Worse still, he felt that part of his imagination stirring. The doctors hadn’t shaken it out of him; they hadn’t even buried it deep enough. A malicious smile was growing on the little girl’s long face, as if she knew exactly what he was thinking. Her fingers wriggled as they hung beside her ankle-length white dress, and he was terrified that she was about to pull it up to taunt him. He would have dodged past her and fled, except that he couldn’t bear the thought of touching her. He swung round and pressed his face against the wall, struggling to force his feelings back into the dark and hold on to what he had to tell Alison.
His ears began to roar with the pressure of blood in his head. The tiles of the wall flattened his forehead, yet they might have been miles away. Even when he clenched his eyes shut he could see the little girl, her long secret legs, her knowing smile. The roaring seemed to flood out of him, obliterating his sense of where he was. He thrust himself away from the wall and turned dizzily. He had to get past her, no matter how.
His eyes had been so tightly shut that for several seconds he was blind. His vision cleared just as his right foot wavered into empty space. The roaring wasn’t only the sound of his blood. He saw the little girl’s smile widen, a smile of gleeful satisfaction, as he stepped helplessly off the platform in front of the oncoming train.
He made a grab at the platform as he fell, and the heel of his hand thumped the edge. He felt his wrist break, driving a spike of pain through his arm all the way to his shoulder. But he’d caught himself from sprawling across the trac
ks; he’d kept his balance with one foot on either side of the rail nearest the platform. He clutched his broken wrist to his chest with his other hand, imagining how much pain he would be suffering by the time he was taken to the hospital, and stumbled backward splay-legged as the train screeched toward him.
The brakes would save him, he told himself. The thought seemed as clear as his pain. He could see from the strain that dragged the driver’s shocked face taut how hard he must be applying the brakes. Even when the front of the train towered over him like the collapsing wall of a house, Lance thought he could outdistance it. When the buffer shoved at his chest it seemed firm but surprisingly gentle, nuzzling him into the tunnel at a speed his feet could match. Then a sleeper caught his heel, and he fell backward, his spine on the rail. Before he could heave himself aside, the wheel of the train pinned him and split him open to the top of his head.
It let him out of his body at once, but the agony of it came with him. He felt as if he’d turned into a wound that would never finish widening, growing rawer as it gaped. But he was retreating into the dark, and as the mouth of the tunnel dwindled, the agony began to fade. He would leave his secret thoughts behind with his body that lay at the mouth of the tunnel, he realised: he would be at peace. Then, just before the light rushed away from him and went out, the little girl leaned into the tunnel and stared pitilessly at him, reminding him of his worst fancies and the guilt they bred, leaving him alone with them in the dark.
Chapter Nine
A three-year-old was crying because she couldn’t scratch her arm through the plaster cast when Derek phoned the ward. “The Southport job’s a bugger. I won’t be home until nine at least. Jo says she’ll take Rowan home from school.”
The Influence Page 6