What She Knew

by Gilly MacMillan

  Emma’s phone rang just as Fraser finished filling us in. She glanced at it. “It’s Rachel Jenner, boss,” she said. “Should I tell her?”

  “Nuh uh,” said Fraser. “Not a word, not yet.”

  RACHEL

  Zhang agreed to come and give me a lift to the nursing home. She drove carefully and we didn’t talk.

  Sitting beside her in the silence, I felt, for the first time since Ben had gone, a sort of awakening, an impulse from within, which told me to lift my head up from the sand, to stop burrowing into my memories of Ben, and instead to look around me, to be more alert.

  I needed to consider people, to assess them, as a detective might, as Clemo might, and I needed to do it now. I’d placed my trust in my husband and my sister in the past, and both of them had proved themselves unreliable.

  I needed to consider my assumptions about life too.

  I’d also placed my trust in the veneer of a civilized society, the lie that is sold to us daily, which is that life is fundamentally good and that violence only happens to those who warrant it; it tarnishes only the trophy that’s already stained. That’s the same logic as the age-old accusation that a raped woman somehow deserves it, and based on that, without questioning it, I’d trusted that if Ben ran ahead of me in the woods, then he would come to no harm, because I believed myself to be fundamentally good.

  And, worse, the betrayal had been a double one because Ben had also put his trust in me, in the way that children must, and so I’d failed him as well as myself: abjectly and possibly finally.

  I looked at Zhang’s hand on the wheel, her knuckles white as she gripped it firmly at ten to two, and I realized that beyond my first impressions I hadn’t before thought about who she really was, or what she might be like.

  “Do you have a family?” I asked her, as the car idled at a junction.

  “I have a mum and dad,” she replied.

  “I mean children of your own?” Though as I said it, I realized she was probably too young.

  “No.” She shook her head. “I won’t have children for a while, if ever.”

  “Oh. You know that already?”

  “I do.”

  “Can I ask why?”

  “Because I’m not ready to be responsible for somebody else’s life yet.”

  She said it so simply that it gave me a frisson of shock because I realized that she already knew what I was only just working out—that we should look very carefully indeed before we leap, or believe, or trust—and that this younger woman had recognized that before I did only made me feel more foolish.

  I didn’t know how to respond so I fixated on what was around me. Outside, the sky was the kind of gray that looks perpetual and heavy, and the clothing of the people in the street was flattened against them by a strong wind. I retreated back into silence and the slow unfurling of the thoughts in my head, where I was starting to doubt everything I ever thought I’d known.

  There was one consolation at that moment when everything weighed unbearably heavily and when suspicion was beginning to edge into every corner of my mind. It was that I was on my way to visit Ruth. I desperately wanted to see her because she was one of my favorite people in the world. Ever since Ben was a baby, she’d been a reassuring presence in my life, offering me gentle, unconditional support, and our friendship had grown alongside him.

  Life hadn’t been easy for Ruth. To those who didn’t know her she would appear dignified, proud, and fragile, always chic in a uniform of dark clothes with a scarf neatly tied at her neck, a silky flash of color. As a young woman, she’d had the talent to be a concert violinist, but she’d also felt things so deeply that they could wound her.

  Her violin playing had captivated John’s father. “I fell in love with her the first time I saw her play,” Nicholas Finch would proudly tell everyone, in his Brummy accent. In fact, most people who’d heard her play were entranced. She’d trained and performed on the instrument for years, but ultimately found public performance an intolerable pressure, and as a result, when she was in her twenties, shortly after marrying John’s father, she’d sunk deeply into the first of many bouts of depression that she suffered throughout her life.

  I first met Ruth in early 2003, a good year for her. She and Nicholas were enjoying his retirement. After a long career as a GP, which had kept him working all hours, finally having him around had helped Ruth remain stable. They were planning to buy a small apartment in the Alps, and they’d taken a successful trip the previous year to Vienna, to see the buildings and neighborhoods that Ruth’s parents grew up in. Lotte and Walter Stern had been musicians too, both successful and well-respected performers before the war, but they’d become refugees, driven from Vienna after Kristallnacht, when Lotte Stern was heavily pregnant with her daughter.

  In the summer of 2003, John and I made our first visit together to his parents’ home in Birmingham. I found Ruth and Nicholas charming and welcoming. Their contrasting personalities intrigued me. Nicholas was a big, warmhearted man with a kindly, relaxed manner, which had won him many friends among his patients during his years as a GP. His bonhomie was the opposite of Ruth’s nervous disposition, but she welcomed me cautiously.

  Ruth’s mother and father both died in 2004, and she took it hard. As a tribute to them, she preserved many of their traditions long after their deaths. Lotte Stern had kept a special white tablecloth just for making the delicate strudel pastry that she took much pride in. Ruth kept the tablecloth, and more than once made what we called “Lotte’s strudel” with Ben, asking him to stir the filling while she showed him the methods she used to stretch and roll the wafer-thin pastry.

  In fact, it was the tiny Benedict Finch, only six pounds, thirteen ounces when he was born in July 2004, who brought Ruth back to us after her parents’ death. She adored him instantly. She opened her arms to him and never wanted to let him go, and to all of our surprise, she included me in that embrace. Right after Ben’s birth, she came to stay and she helped me through the difficult first weeks and months, and then she never stopped helping. She became a companion to me, a friend, and a wonderful grandmother to Ben.

  John told me a story about Ruth once. It was a rare confidence about his childhood that he told me just after I’d met her. I think he wanted to explain her to me. It was a story that showed her darkness and her light.

  When John was about nine years old, he’d gone to see Ruth after school. It was during one of her periods of depression, and he was ushered quietly into her darkened bedroom to show her a prize that he’d won that day.

  Ruth examined his certificate, and then propped it up on her bedside table. She patted the bed beside her. It was a rare invitation and John sat down carefully, desperate not to break the moment, daring to do nothing more than glance around the room, which the drawn curtains had given a chiaroscuro quality, so it felt to him as if he and his mother were drawn characters in a children’s book.

  “Where I am weak,” she said to him that afternoon, “you can be strong. Like your father.”

  She held his hand tenderly, examining with the tips of her fingers each of his. He remembered that sensation. Then she spoke to him of music. John explained to me that when Ruth was drained of life, she seemed always to have music left in her, and it was this that was her gift to him, even when she lacked the energy to get him up, make his packed lunch, or take him to school in the morning.

  After sitting with his mother until she was too tired to talk anymore, John left her room with his little heart beating, relieved to escape her intensity yet longing for more of it.

  When we arrived at the nursing home, Zhang said she’d wait in the car.

  Ruth was in her room. It was a generous size, one of the nicer rooms upstairs, with large windows overlooking a garden and some mature trees below. It was a thousand times nicer than some of the gray and murky spaces we’d looked at before placing Ruth here.

  Those homes were like holding pens, where residents waited for death with little more status t
han corpses. Loneliness, confusion, pain, and the smell of urine and boiled food seemed to be their only companions as the light faded on their lives. Those places had made me shudder, and sometimes weep.

  Carpe diem was the lesson to be learned. It’s what I had been trying to teach Ben when I let him run ahead in the woods. Seize the day—be brave—be independent—be thoughtful—don’t be scared to make mistakes—keep learning—all of those things, all the time. And somebody had taken him. More fool me.

  Ruth’s chair was turned to face the window. Her hand rested on its arm, her arthritic knuckles gnarled and inflamed, her fingers resting at unnatural angles. Macular degeneration was starting to steal her vision, and she had to keep her head at a sideways angle to see me properly. Somebody had done her makeup; there was rouge on her waxy skin, a smudge of the bright lipstick she’d always favored.

  Classical music was playing softly and I was relieved to see that it was a CD as John had requested, and there was no sign of her radio so there was no chance of her hearing about Ben on the news.

  “Rachel,” she said. “Darling.” She reached for my hands with her own and cupped them stiffly, a favorite gesture of hers.

  “Where’s Ben?” she said. “I missed you on Wednesday. People think I know nothing anymore, but I do know when it’s Wednesday.”

  She was putting a brave face on it, attempting to maintain her dignity, but I knew from her carers that her agitation had been more extreme than she was letting on. She was also more lucid than I’d expected, and I didn’t know whether to be grateful for that or not.

  “He wanted to try chess club,” I said. “I was planning to bring him over here after it finished, but he was feeling poorly when I collected him. I’m sorry. I should have phoned.”

  “You should have,” she said. Manners mattered to Ruth. “I thought it was half-term, that I’d forgotten, I’m a little forgetful nowadays you know,” she told me, as if this were news, as if I hadn’t been minutely tracking the destructive progress of her dementia since her original diagnosis, “but Sister told me she was sure it was next week.”

  I’d forgotten that half-term was about to start, of course I had.

  “What was wrong?” Ruth asked.

  “He had a sore throat, a bit of a temperature, I think it was a virus.”

  “Should he be back at school? Is he wrapped up warm?”

  “Yes,” I said, and the lie felt as though it might wind its way around my throat, and tighten.

  “Is he working hard?” she said. Her eyes were milky, and the impotence of her condition wandered around their depths. “At the hospital?”

  She was confusing Ben and John. It happened often, and I went with it.

  “Not too hard. He’s doing well.”

  “He must practice, when he’s better, because when he is big enough and good enough he must have the Testore.”

  The Testore was Ruth’s violin: a beautiful instrument, made in eighteenth-century Milan, her most valued and valuable possession.

  “He’s not showing any signs of growing out of his half-size yet,” I said.

  “No, but he will. They do, you know.” A half-smile played on her lips, a memory, and then died away again.

  “What’s he playing?”

  “Oskar Rieding. Concerto in B minor.”

  “The whole thing?”

  “Just the third movement for now.”

  “He must be careful with his bow control. In this passage in particular.”

  Ruth began to hum the Rieding concerto, her hand beating time. She had an extraordinary memory for music. Each note she’d ever played, or taught, seemed to have found a place to lodge in her head, all its resonance still alive to her. She’d started Ben on the violin when he was six, insisted on paying for his lessons. He was showing promise, some of the musicality that had traveled from Vienna, through her family, and that thrilled Ruth.

  She stopped abruptly. “Have you got that?” she asked, as if I was her pupil myself.

  “Yes. I’ll remind him.”

  She pulled herself forward. Her dress shifted over her skeletal knees, catching on the surgical stockings that she wore on her calves. I noticed a small stain on her pretty yellow scarf. On a table, just within her reach, a shiny golden sweet sat in the middle of a crocheted doily. Her hands scrabbled uselessly to grasp it, but I knew better than to offer to help because that would have upset her. Finally, her fingers got a purchase on it.

  “For Ben,” she said. “I saved it.”

  On the rare occasions that Ruth took part in the communal activities in the home, she was ruthless about acquiring the sweets that were sometimes offered as prizes. She hoarded them for Ben.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  She went through the same rigmarole to reach something else, a book. She passed it to me. “Look at this. I got it from the library. Does it remind you of anything?” A smile passed across her lips, a rare sight nowadays, usually bestowed only on Ben.

  I took the book, ran my hand over its shiny cover, and felt the dog-eared edges. It was a monograph, and its subject was the artist Odilon Redon.

  “The museum,” I said. “When we took Ben to see the dinosaurs and ended up looking at the paintings.”

  “Yes!” she said. “I’ve marked the page. Can you see?”

  I opened the book where she’d inserted a bookmark. It was a garish yellow strip of leather with a design of the Clifton Suspension Bridge embossed in it in gold. Ruth didn’t have many ugly possessions, but this was one of them and she kept it because Ben had bought it for her on a school trip.

  “We looked at the William Scott painting first, do you remember?” said Ruth.

  I did. It was a huge canvas, wall-sized, with an ink-black background and four large formless abstract shapes floating within it, in white, darker black, and a complex shade of blue that brought to mind a sunlit Cornish coastline. “What is it?” Ben had asked me, his hand nestled in mine. “It’s whatever you want it to be,” I’d said. “I like it,” he replied. “It’s random.” “Random” was a new word that Ben had learned at school, and he used it whenever he could.

  In the next gallery Ben had been drawn to a small canvas by Odilon Redon, and a copy of this was revealed when I opened the book. In the museum, Ben had stood in front of it, just inches from it, while Ruth and I stood behind him.

  “What is this one?” he asked us. In the center of the painting was a white figure, mounted on a rearing white horse and holding aloft a long stick with a green flag at the top of it, which looked to be fluttering in a hot breeze. Behind the figure were two boats, barely emerging from the thickly painted background, with its suggestions of land, sea, clouds, and sky in dusty shades of brown and blue.

  “It’s a bit messy,” said Ben.

  “The artist has done that on purpose,” Ruth told him. “He wants to suggest a dream to you, a world where stories take place and where you can use your imagination.”

  “What is the story?”

  “Like your mummy said about the other painting, the story is anything you want it to be. It’s everything or nothing.”

  “I would like to have a green flag,” said Ben.

  “Then you could be an adventurer too, like the person in this painting. Would you like a white horse?”

  Ben nodded.

  “And what about a boat?” Ruth asked him.

  “No thank you,” he said, and I knew he would say that, because Ben had a fear of the sea.

  “Do you know what I see in this painting?” Ruth asked him.

  He looked up at her.

  “I see a brave person riding a magnificent horse and I wonder where that person is going and where they’ve been,” she told him. “And I also see music.”

  “Where is the music?” he asked.

  “It’s in there. It’s in the paint, and the sea and the sky and in the story of the person and their horse and the ships,” said Ruth. “All those things give me the idea of music, and then I can hear it in
my head.”

  “And for me too,” he said. He smiled at her, his face lit up. “It’s lots of fast notes, like an adventure.”

  “And slow ones too,” said Ruth. “Do you see here—that thick bit of paint, where you can see how the painter smeared it on with his brush? That’s a slow note for me.”

  Ben considered that. “Can you hear it, Mummy?”

  “Definitely,” I told him, and in that moment just the sound of his voice, the innocence ringing in it, the eagerness to listen, was music enough. On that day, my son was seven years old, and I suspected already that he might not be the kind of child who could win a running race, or triumph on a rugby pitch, so to see him respond in this way to the paintings was a joy. It gave me so much hope for his future, that sensitivity he had, the way that he might be able to respond so positively to beauty and to ideas. I felt it would enable him to create reserves that he could draw on when he needed to, and I knew I could guide him through that, or at least set him off on his way.

  What I hadn’t realized on that day, as Ruth and I took him downstairs to find tea and cake, was that he might need to draw on his reserves so soon. Before he would be ready. Or that he might never get a chance to build them up before they were shattered forever.

  “Do you want to borrow the book?” Ruth asked. I was lost on the page, in the image, and her voice pulled me back to now. “Ben might like to see it.”

  What to answer? How to disguise my emotions? I managed only to say, “He would. Thank you.”

  “Bring him to see me next week. Promise you will.”

  I was struggling to hold myself together. I went to stand at the window, keeping my face turned away from her, looking out at the beds of pruned roses in the garden below, at the sweeping, gracious branches of a mature cedar tree. But Ruth was no fool, dementia notwithstanding.

  “What is it, dear?” she said.

  “I’m fine.”