Slowly we trudge the sodden path back towards Warren House Inn. The mist is lifting, slightly, showing the undulant moors ahead. Acid turf, wet desert.
‘So I was conscious when I was found? By the reservoir?’
‘Yes, Kath. Go left here.’
‘And did I say anything?’
‘Apparently not. Just help me, help me. Then you fell into a coma, in the ambulance. And you woke up in hospital. Your brother was the first to come in: they couldn’t reach me.’
‘Daniel came in first? I thought it was you?!’
He shrugs. ‘You’ve forgotten that too. You were very hazy that first day. Slowly recovered, over the next week.’
So Tessa was right, again. My memory, in trying to heal, has invented facts. I remember the moment Adam walked into the hospital ward, with flowers, peaches, books, poetry. How I cried with happiness that my first visitor, after my accident, should be my lovely husband come to see his miracle wife.
But that was all nonsense. My first visitor was actually Daniel, my brother. Why Daniel?
Because Adam could not be reached.
My husband points ahead. ‘There, Warren House. You can make it easily from here. Just follow the stream: always follow the stream, darling, when you’re lost. I better go back.’
My husband could not be reached. He was unavailable. He wasn’t there. All those days after Boxing Day.
I sense a need in me, to get some perspective, to examine this objectively. Shattering into helpless pieces doesn’t help Lyla, or me. I am being too timid. I put a hand on my husband’s wrist. ‘Adam, I know you were doing up that hut: you left the house day after Boxing Day, right?’
‘Yes. We’d planned it,’ he says, his voice flat and calm. ‘I told you before Christmas, you were fine about it, said I deserved some time away, on my own. Like we do.’
This is true. Adam works longer hours than me, earns more than me. His summer days can last from dawn to dusk. And we long ago decided that the quid pro quo would be him having some time out, away from his intense and sometimes wearying family. This is our dynamic, this give and take; it’s the machinery of our marriage, why we’re still on the road.
But we came off the road. Down at Burrator.
‘But where exactly were you, Adam, that week?’
‘Old rangers’ hut. Parks Authority premises.’
‘But where?’ I realize I’ve never asked him this.
‘Dixworthy.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘It’s hard to describe.’
‘Why?’
He sighs, exasperated. ‘Does it matter? It’s wilderness, up on the northern moors. Between, I don’t know, Manaton, thataway. Do you want a postcode? Google Street View? What’s the point?’
I get his drift. We are man and wife, standing in a dwindling mist, on a slope of grey moor, arguing about the exact position of a rangers’ hut, to explain why the wife attempted suicide. It is ridiculous. And yet I do need to know.
‘Wait,’ I say, ‘I think I’ve heard of Manaton. It’s quite near Kitty Jay’s grave, isn’t it? Towards Chagford?’
He’s silent. For a moment, his expression changes. I see a hint of something: then it is gone. But I saw it. I saw it. I’m sure of it.
‘OK, I’ve got to skin a bloody sheep! Say hello to Ron for me. Ask if he wants some mutton chops.’
He returns the way we came.
I turn, and walk downhill, following the stream. In a few minutes I reach Warren House. I am the only soul about. Just one, small, black-faced sheep loiters, skittishly, by the whitewashed wall. It looks at me: at the bloodstains on my jeans, at the mud and damp smeared across my stupid cowardly face. It doesn’t even bother saying meh.
For a moment, I am rooted to this dark Dartmoor earth. I am a standing stone. Cold and hard. Because I’ve known Adam for twenty years. And I’ve realized what I saw on my husband’s face. That expression, just glimpsed.
Guilt.
Salcombe
Saturday morning
Everything was unnaturally quiet. Saturday morning usually meant weekly Peak Noise for the Kinnersley household, as Charlie and Oscar woke up, realized it was Saturday, whooped with delight, and decided to re-enact a light-sabre fight from Star Wars with bananas.
Today Tessa Kinnersley sat at her desk in her little study, in a converted attic on the top floor, and listened to the blissful silence. She sighed with something approaching contentment. Her main work for the day was done: she’d written up the research for her set of lectures next year. The Psychology of Evil.
Now she sipped her organic coffee, cupped its warmth in her hands and looked out of the Victorian window at the sailing boats in the little harbour, the woodlands over the water. Dog walkers were exchanging pleasantries on the waterfront; a young couple strolled hand-in-hand, gazing in the windows of estate agents, and moving on with a frown.
It was a mild winter day on the south Devon coast. The sun was slanting through the study window: if you stood in its warmth and closed your eyes, you might imagine it was spring.
She wondered how many hours of peace she had before her. Dan had loaded the boys into his big Lexus at about ten a.m., the movie the boys so wanted to see started around noon, so they’d all be back by three. Or four. She had the house all to herself for almost the whole day, which was a pleasant feeling. Later she might go down to the deli, buy some of that amazing Spanish ham, the Jamón ibérico de bellota, make a lunchtime sandwich.
But first she had a different hunger to satisfy: an appetite for the truth about her sister-in-law’s suicide bid. It vexed her intensely. Delivering the awful truth to Kath had only deepened Tessa’s worries. What would happen to Kath when her memories returned? And why had she done it in the first place?
The sums didn’t make sense. Every time Tessa added two plus two, the answer seemed to be three. Some ingredient was missing from the story, dark matter that she couldn’t discern. How could a woman go from a noisy, cosy family Christmas, with kids happily squabbling over the two-pound coin in the pudding, to the darkness of suicide four days later?
Tessa poured herself some more coffee from the cafetière, and returned to her desk, staring at her black computer screen. Had there been any clue in that Christmas of what was to come? She couldn’t think of anything. It had been a notably happy Christmas, if anything. Dan and Adam, who didn’t especially like each other, but who rubbed along when necessary, had bonded over some abstruse argument about rugby – and some of Dan’s cigars in the garden. Kath had seemed relaxed, smiley, delighted, that Lyla had kids to play with; Kath’s occasional sibling friction with Dan, the favoured son, was also absent.
And the kids had really played: hide and seek all over the house, up and down five floors, from cellar to attic, squealing in mock terror as they discovered each other in the second bathroom, behind the shower curtains.
Lyla had twirled on the spot as the three cousins, the three mischief-makers, planned the next game. The psychologist in Tessa had long ago recognized these unusual body movements as a kind of stimming – self-stimulation – the repetitive physical tics of kids on the autistic spectrum, but this spinning like a top was Lyla’s happy stim.
When Lyla was unhappy she would grimace, or even bark. Or flutter her hands like little birds, up and down, up and down. Sometimes Lyla’s stims were quite distressing. Eerie faces, manic flapping. But there had been no unhappy stims at Christmas.
Christmas had been good. And on Boxing Day the Redways had said goodbye and a big thank you, and had loaded up the battered National Park Land Rover with a box of leftovers for Felix and Randal. As they’d reversed out of the drive, Lyla had waved giddily at Charlie and Oscar, the dogs panting by her side. On the back seat.
Four days later Kath Redway had slowly and carefully driven her car into the drowning blackness of Burrator.
Two plus two equals three. Where was the dark matter?
Swallowing more coffee, Tessa turned on her laptop, and cl
icked to a site she had already bookmarked. Suicide. Causation. Warning signs.
One in four people who attempt suicide leave a note. If a note is left, it significantly increases the likelihood that the suicide bid will be successful …
Kath had left a note. And she had very nearly succeeded. Which meant this next information was especially troubling:
A third of people who attempt suicide will repeat the attempt within one year, and about 10 per cent of those who threaten or attempt suicide will eventually succeed in killing themselves.
Was there a genetic explanation? It seemed not. There was no history of insanity or suicide among the Kinnersleys, according to Dan. His mother had enjoyed a happy childhood, as had her parents in turn. The worst family trait was a hint of alcoholism, but, as Dan said, while cracking open another bottle of Rioja, everyone before 1950 was alcoholic by modern standards.
Dan certainly liked a drink, and whenever he drank, and Tessa quizzed him about it, he would tell her that Winston Churchill drank forty-two thousand bottles of champagne in his life, and in between silver tankards of Pol Roger Reserve, he had defeated the Nazis and won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
As for their father, the passing American, he’d died in a car crash. No drunks, no drink, just bad luck, and a ludicrous funeral, as much as Dan remembered it, with Hare Krishna and pagan ululations, devised by Penny K. herself.
Paging through the website, Tessa searched for the facts she wanted. Here:
During pregnancy and the first year afterward, there is a three- to eight-fold decrease in the risk of suicide.
And here:
One Swedish study (Berglund, 1992) showed that having children is notably protective against suicide; instances of suicidality amongst parents appear to be half those of nonparents. This is especially true of parents of young children (under 12) …
Tessa sat back from the screen. This was why two plus two made three. The missing one was Lyla. Tessa simply did not believe that Kath Redway would leave her only child, her only daughter, even more alone in the world. Kath adored that child: who loved her mother right back. If anything, Lyla gave Kath her purpose. Lyla was crucial to Kath.
And Lyla was very lovable, in her own way. When Tessa had visited Huckerby in the run-up to Christmas, Lyla had proudly shown off all the bird feathers she’d collected, and had enthusiastically recited the names of all the species. Perhaps thirty or forty names in Latin, word perfect, yet laughing at herself as she did it, mocking her own obsessions.
It was touching, and sweet. If you let that lonely little girl be herself, the smiles came, and the wit and the laughter, and her pretty face glowed. If you could break through the intense shyness, little Lyla Redway had an inner loveliness, and what mother would forsake that? Certainly not Kath.
The coffee was cold. Tessa drank the bitterness anyway, staring, hard, and unseeing, through the window at the sunlit roofs of Salcombe and the blue of Kingsbridge estuary. An idea was forming.
Could it be something to do with Adam? His disappearance, right after Christmas, was a little abrupt. But the Redways sometimes did that. They had periods apart, the odd week; also, they loved each other, and they both loved Lyla. Things were solid between them. Adam had endured that illness a few years back, and Kath had nursed him through it.
Infidelity? Tessa considered it for a moment, and dismissed it. Yes, Adam was very handsome and women surely desired him, but Tessa hadn’t heard a whisper of anything like infidelity. Not even a rumour, and Dartmoor in winter was full of rumours of unfaithfulness. There wasn’t much else to do.
What else?
Closing her laptop, Tessa went through the facts of the day itself. The afternoon before her suicide bid, Kath had left Lyla with a friend. Emma Spalding. The Spaldings were the nearest neighbours, and also the Redways’ landlords, the owners of Huckerby.
According to Emma, Kath’s request had been unexpected, but not unusual: she quite often asked Emma to help out and Emma liked having Lyla stay over. Sometimes Lyla wandered all by herself, in her feral way, from Huckerby across the wild moors to the Spalding farm, always trailing her protectors, Felix and Randal. And when she did this, Emma would give Lyla biscuits and milk and they’d all go to the stables, where the Spaldings kept their horses.
Lyla loved those horses. She would spend hours grooming and feeding them, combing their manes, looking after them when they were ill. Emma Spalding once told Tessa she was convinced the sick horses got better when Lyla was there, as if she had special gifts. Something uncanny, something magical.
But Tessa didn’t believe in gifts, or witchcraft, or the uncanny. The mind was a machine, the human soul a programme. Her lectures on the nature of evil were designed to show this: that genes and the environment, nature and nurture, the parents and the planet – and their complex interaction – were always responsible for human cruelty and criminality.
Which meant that there had to be a logical explanation for Kath’s apparently meaningless yet callous decision to kill herself, and leave her little daughter without a mother.
And the answer was up there. On the high moorland. Hidden but findable.
Tessa stared out of her arched study window. A large seagull had suddenly landed on the neighbouring roof. A huge grey bird, shaking its head violently, like it was silently saying NO NO NO
Saturday afternoon
Tessa’s mobile rang, interrupting her novel. The screen read KATH.
With a needling of anxiety, she took the call. Sitting up on the sofa, putting the book down.
‘Hey, Kath? Everything OK?’
‘Yes. Yes, I’m fine. I just wanted to ask something. Ask Dan something. But he’s not answering.’
Kath’s voice sounded strained. But it had sounded strained ever since Burrator. Unsurprisingly. Tessa glanced at her watch, 3.20 p.m. ‘He’s probably driving, Kath. He took the boys to Plymouth, some space movie, or maybe dinosaurs. It’s in 3D – that’s all they cared about.’
Kath chuckled. Tessa went on, ‘So he’s probably got his phone switched off, he’s religious about it when he drives with the boys.’
‘Yes,’ said Kath. And nothing else.
‘What is it, Kath? I can ask him when he gets here, or get him to ring you – won’t be long.’
‘OK, OK.’ Kath trailed off. Unconvincingly.
In her mind, Tessa pictured her sister-in-law in the longhouse, high up on the moors. It might be sunny down here, but it could be raining, hailing, foggy, even snowing up there. Only thirty miles away, but such a different world. A colder, harder world.
‘Kath?’
‘I just wanted to ask him about that day. You see, I found out that Dan was the first person to come to the hospital.’ Her voice cracked at the edges.
Tessa said gently, ‘And you’d forgotten that?’
‘Yes! I really genuinely thought the first person to come in was Adam! Oh God, Tessa, these memories, they’re all over the place, I feel as if my mind is scattered, like – like a load of toys, like when Lyla was three, you know how toddlers can ruin a living room in five seconds? That’s what my mind is like. And I want to put the toys back in their right places, the proper boxes. Does that make any sense?’
‘Of course. And it will happen, Kath. The memories will return: the brain heals over time. But you do have to give it time.’
‘OK, yes. I know you’re right.’ Kath sighed. ‘Thank you, Tessa. I’ve got to go fetch Lyla. God knows where she is, it’ll be getting dark soon. But—’
‘Go on.’
‘Could you ask Dan what time he came to see me? I need to get the chronology right. In my head? Maybe ask him to call me?’
‘Sure. Of course.’
They said goodbye. Tessa lay back on her sofa, picked up her novel, got through two paragraphs, at which point her unusually peaceful Saturday was shattered by the noise of her boys returning with Dan: an eruption of energy, the shouts and flinging of coats. Mummy, Mummy, Mummy! The film was brilliant, they
had helmets made of light and and and . . .
It took her an hour to get her husband on his own. The boys had settled to some computer game in the living room. She and Dan had retreated into the big bright kitchen for cups of hot tea.
‘So after the film we went to some corner shop, with a lottery machine, and Oscar said, apropos of absolutely nothing, if we won the lottery he’d buy a snowy owl and three micro pigs, for you and me and Charlie, and mine would be ginger and sleep with me at night.’ Dan laughed. ‘Honestly, where do they get this stuff? It’s like children are brilliant French surrealists. Shame they have to wake up.’
Tessa chuckled, too. ‘I got a call from Kath.’
‘Oh yes?’ His smile faded. ‘Anything wrong?’
‘No, no. I mean, she says she’s OK. But she had a question, about, well, that night, or rather the next day.’
‘Ask away. I’d do anything to help her, you know that, Tessa. But I feel so absolutely helpless. There’s no solution to this mystery. But ask.’
‘She says that you were the first to see her, not Adam, in the hospital. But she says she forgot that – another aspect of her amnesia, of course. And she wanted to know the chronology, to fill in the gaps. What time you visited, that kind of thing.’
Dan frowned. ‘Good question.’ His frown deepened. ‘God, I dunno. It was all so chaotic, it’s a blur.’
‘You were in London, that business trip,’ she prompted.
‘Yes, let me work it out.’ He paced to the kitchen windows, looked out at the back garden, the swing, the winter twilight, the fine day dying into rose and darkness. ‘So I got the call in the morning, from the hospital, and I hammered the car down the M4, yep, yep, I remember that, I think I did Chiswick Roundabout to Plymouth in about three bloody hours. Fuck. Lucky it wasn’t speed-cammed. So, yeah, it must have been about noon.’ He shrugged. ‘Does that help? I’ll call her. I’ll call her later, I promise. I’ve got to talk to her about the birthdays anyway. Charlie and Lyla.’
Just Before I Died Page 9