Ralph’s Children

by Hilary Norman

  ‘We’re getting there,’ Kate said. ‘That’s the main thing.’

  * * *

  ‘One more to go,’ she said an hour or so later, after she and Rob had got back into bed with a bottle of red and a pizza from the freezer because suddenly they’d realized they were both famished. ‘The Chief.’

  ‘I reckon the others will give him up,’ Rob said.

  ‘You still think it’s a man,’ Kate said.

  He’d told her once that he thought a person who sent others to do their dirty work was probably fundamentally cowardly.

  ‘I still think women, on the whole, are braver than men,’ he said now.

  Kate shrugged, snuggled closer.

  ‘Right this minute,’ he went on, ‘we have more important things to think about.’

  ‘Like our pizza getting cold,’ she said.

  ‘Fuck the pizza,’ Rob said.

  And began to kiss her breasts.

  Ralph

  Ralph had known that Pig would not be able to resist much longer.

  She had made him promise, last time they spoke, not to do anything stupid, had even mentioned Simon’s birthday, and he had told her not to worry.

  Foolish, loving man.

  Edward Booth, as they would be calling him.

  She had always known how much Pig had loved Simon, wondered now, suddenly, if maybe he’d known they would catch him, if maybe it might even have been what he’d wanted.

  She was all alone now. All her children lost to her.

  Only her hate left to warm her.

  To keep her going.

  Kate

  The end of Kate’s world came in a phone call.

  At five forty-three on an early September afternoon.

  Rob’s first Saturday as a volunteer, though he’d visited Lambsmoor Farm twice before as a spectator.

  ‘I might not get to do any riding,’ he’d said that morning before leaving. ‘Each child has one helper to lead their pony, and at least one – sometimes two more – to walk by their side to avoid accidents.’

  Kate had liked the sound of that.

  ‘Perhaps this is something,’ she said now, ‘that I could do with you sometime. So long as I don’t have to get up on the horse.’

  ‘You wouldn’t,’ Rob had said, real pleasure in his face. ‘I’d love that.’

  It had not happened during the children’s ride, the organizer told her on the phone.

  His name was Mack, and his own shock and distress were clear in his voice.

  ‘It was later,’ he told Kate, ‘while Rob and another helper were riding together on Lambsmoor Hill.’

  In the kitchen, Kate sat down at the table, laid her left hand on the surface.

  ‘His colleague’s horse was acting up, and your husband went to help,’ Mack went on. ‘His mare lost her footing and fell.’

  She stared at her wedding ring, then at the veins beneath her skin.

  ‘Is Rob all right?’

  She could hear calm in her voice.

  Knew, already, that in another moment it would be gone.

  Everything would be gone.

  ‘Please,’ she said. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘I’m afraid your husband was crushed by the horse,’ Mack said.

  Blood rushed through arteries, roared in her head and through her soul.

  Her hand moved off the tabletop and gripped the edge, to keep her from falling from her chair.

  ‘Is he alive?’ Kate asked, at last.

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ Mack answered. ‘I am so very sorry, Mrs Turner.’

  His face was unmarked. Calm and peaceful.

  Sleeping. None of it true, after all.

  Kate’s father was holding her right hand tightly while she fought to keep the inevitable at bay for just a few more seconds.

  Please.

  Michael began to weep, his tears confirming what her eyes had refused to register: that it was true. Yet still it was not real to her even then, with Rob before her.

  And her tears, like her mind, seemed frozen.

  They gave her time, were all very kind.

  Someone came, after a while, to speak to her about tissue donation.

  A woman in a dark suit with ash blond hair and sad eyes.

  Kate heard the word ‘tissue’ and stopped her.

  ‘What about his organs?’ she asked. ‘Rob carried a donor card.’

  She comprehended what the other woman was speaking about, but it seemed to be happening at a strange and inaccessible level, as if they were talking about someone else entirely.

  ‘Your husband’s heart,’ the woman explained to Kate and Michael, ‘stopped beating too long before the paramedics reached him, which means, unfortunately, that his organs are unusable. Tissue and bone, however, can be donated for up to twenty-four hours after death.’

  ‘Right,’ Kate said. ‘OK.’

  And then, with a shudder of deep shock, it came to her what they would have to do to Rob to grant that final wish, and though his death was still not real to her, the picture of scalpels cutting into his flesh was suddenly so acutely real she wanted to scream.

  ‘Now, please,’ she said to Michael, her voice harsh. ‘We have to go now.’

  ‘But don’t you want to—’

  ‘Now.’

  * * *

  The days blurred, one into the next.

  People around her all the time. Her parents, other people, Abby Wells flying over from Brussels where she’d been working, other friends and colleagues. Richard Fireman, the police, Martin Blake, neighbours she scarcely remembered meeting. All wanting to help her, treading gently.

  She hated them all, longed for them to go.

  To leave her alone with what was left of Rob.

  They had been together again for what seemed such a short time, yet it had begun to feel as if he had never gone away; his essence had been infused back into their cottage, which was why she needed them all to be gone, so that she could hold on to it for as long as it remained.

  Hold on to him.

  Bel was there all the time, sleeping there, making her breakfasts and lunches and suppers, feeding her in a way Kate could not recall her ever having done during her childhood.

  ‘I’d rather do it myself,’ she told her repeatedly.

  ‘Plenty of time for that,’ her mother said.

  ‘It’s helping Bel,’ her father told Kate. ‘If you can stand it.’

  ‘Yes,’ Kate said. ‘Of course.’

  Why not let them do it for her, she decided dully, the way all her thoughts came and went now. Why not let them make her food that she couldn’t eat, and see to it that she went to bed and not sleep, and sit with visitors and not listen to the kind things they said about Rob?

  Bel and Michael scarcely pushed her, until it came to the funeral arrangements.

  ‘Do what you think,’ Kate told them.

  ‘You need to be involved with this,’ Bel said.

  ‘We want this to be right for you,’ Michael said. ‘For Rob.’

  ‘He won’t know,’ Kate said.

  The essence she’d wanted to cling on to, to wrap herself in, be alone with, was ebbing steadily away, was already almost gone, being rubbed out by these other loving, well-meaning people. And when that was finally erased, there would be nothing left of him.

  The funeral arrangements meant nothing to her.

  Rituals.

  * * *

  Marie Coates, the woman from Rob’s school who’d first suggested he volunteer at Lambsmoor Farm, came to visit Kate one week after the funeral.

  It was late September and Kate was alone, Bel having gone home to Henley at last, two days earlier.

  ‘I didn’t want to intrude before,’ Marie Coates said, after Kate had helped her ease her wheelchair over the threshold and into the sitting room.

  She was, Kate thought, in her late forties or perhaps early fifties, had short salt-and-pepper hair and keen grey-blue eyes, wore a cornflower blue pullover over an old-fashioned tweed
skirt that covered her knees.

  ‘No intrusion,’ Kate said, politely.

  She was still on automatic, going through the motions. Not allowing herself to think about her loss, about the months wasted in their last year. Visitors came but soon left again, unnerved, Kate realized, by the invisible but solid wall they encountered, perhaps afraid of being the ones to finally penetrate the force field and release the grief dammed up behind it.

  ‘I didn’t come to the funeral,’ Marie Coates went on, ‘because I felt I might be the last person you’d want there.’

  ‘Why?’ Kate asked. ‘You and Rob were friends.’

  ‘But it was my doing,’ the other woman said. ‘Which is why I’ve come now. To ask for your forgiveness.’

  ‘It was an accident,’ Kate said.

  ‘But Rob wouldn’t have been there,’ Marie Coates said, ‘if I hadn’t talked him into it.’

  Which was true.

  ‘He wanted to go,’ Kate said.

  Because being unkind would not bring him back, and anyway, it was true, he had wanted it.

  ‘Have they told you,’ the older woman asked, ‘that it was me Rob was trying to help when it happened?’

  Kate wished now that she would not go on, because her own courtesy was, in fact, utterly sham. Because ever since she had heard that Rob’s body had been crushed because of his courage, she’d wished with all her strength that this woman had died instead of him.

  ‘You mustn’t blame yourself,’ she managed to say.

  Hauling up the last dregs of her own kindness.

  And then, abruptly, she realized that Marie Coates seemed familiar.

  ‘Have we met before?’ she asked.

  At school, perhaps, though she’d seldom gone there, had not been in the habit of meeting Rob after work. And in any case, since Rob had said Marie Coates worked in the school office, she’d probably kept different hours, so Kate was even more unlikely to have met her there, and yet . . .

  ‘Briefly,’ the other woman answered her question. ‘At a self-help group meeting in Reading some months back.’

  Kate remembered. ‘You were the organizer, when—’

  ‘When one of our members behaved very badly towards you.’

  ‘And you intervened,’ Kate said. ‘I don’t think I ever thanked you.’

  ‘It was my job,’ Marie Coates said. ‘It was nothing.’

  It came to Kate then – for she hadn’t given it a thought till that moment – that Sandi West had come to the funeral and spoken to her, just a few trite words, kindly meant, she supposed, and she recalled now, with mild surprise, that she’d felt no animosity towards her – nor towards Delia, who had, of course, been there. Though then again, feelings of any kind had been at a premium that day, and any that had slipped through had been, in any case, for Rob.

  She offered tea, finally, politely, realizing that for some reason she no longer needed this woman to be quite so swiftly gone.

  ‘I thought my mother told me,’ she said, ‘your name was Mary.’

  ‘That’s how Bel knows me,’ Marie Coates explained. ‘Another member called me Mary my first time there, and I didn’t like to correct her, so that’s who I remained.’ She smiled. ‘It didn’t seem important.’

  Kate found, despite herself, that she liked her, understood why Rob had admired her. Her deftness with her wheelchair and her attitude was such that her disability seemed almost invisible most of the time, certainly irrelevant. She seemed calm, a woman of common sense and candour, which had, Kate presumed, to make her especially effective with children.

  ‘Your volunteer work must be rewarding,’ she said.

  ‘Very,’ Marie said. ‘Rob told me you don’t like horses.’

  ‘I like them well enough from a distance, but getting on board scares me.’

  ‘You’re not alone there,’ the older woman said.

  ‘If that weren’t the case,’ Kate said, ‘I might have been with Rob that day.’

  ‘And he might not have been riding with me.’

  Kate shook her head. ‘There’s no point to that.’

  ‘None at all,’ Marie agreed.

  They spoke for a while about Rob, and Kate could tell how much this woman had liked him, which warmed her. Their cottage had been full lately of people who’d both liked and respected Rob, none of them managing to reach Kate’s penned up senses; but there was, as he had expressed, something special about Marie Coates.

  ‘I hope you know,’ the older woman said, with great gentleness, ‘how very happy you made him.’

  Others had told her that too, yet now the words seemed to rip at Kate’s insides, brought tears to the surface.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ She wiped at her eyes.

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Marie Coates.

  ‘I’ve hardly cried,’ Kate said, which was true.

  ‘Then let it out,’ Marie said, softly. ‘You won’t lose him.’

  Kate wondered, even as she wept, how this stranger could know that was one of the reasons she’d been holding herself together so tightly; because of her irrational fear that by opening up too much, a little more of Rob’s essence – the last, most precious stuff of all hoarded inside her – might escape through the cracks.

  There was something else that Kate had been holding on to tightly.

  A secret, hers and Rob’s, though he hadn’t known about it before.

  He knew now, if he was anywhere at all, for she had whispered it to him a thousand times or more.

  It confused Kate that she should be on the verge of telling this woman, this stranger, something she hadn’t yet shared with her own parents. Perhaps it was because Marie Coates had been Rob’s friend, or perhaps because she was the last person he had spoken to in his life.

  ‘I’m pregnant,’ Kate said.

  Fifteen weeks, give or take.

  She’d had not even the slightest suspicion, before Rob’s death, that she might be pregnant. Her periods, ever since Caisleán, had been erratic, her body confused by shock, she had assumed, still settling down into her new life back with Rob.

  The recent absence of PMS ought, she eventually realized, to have flagged some kind of alert, but it was, she supposed, a little like removal of pain; once you were free of it, you didn’t go in search of it, didn’t ask for trouble.

  Her regret that Rob had not known was vast and all-consuming.

  ‘I don’t want any special tests,’ she had instructed her GP and midwife. ‘No AFP test – or at least, if you have to do anything like that, please don’t tell me if anything’s wrong – and definitely no amniocentesis.’

  She was adamant. Everything necessary to protect the baby, but no deliberate hunt for problems, because nothing and no one would persuade her to consider termination under any circumstances, and she wanted no negative thoughts to scar their child’s growing processes.

  None of that had anything to do with what the Caisleán gang had claimed to stand for. She spat on their brand of fanaticism, whatever might ultimately be claimed by some defence lawyer to have been their fundamental motivation.

  This was the one and only thing she could still do for Rob.

  Their baby, due in mid-March.

  Their baby.

  * * *

  The inquest, in November – opened soon after Rob’s death and then adjourned for reports – seemed to hit Kate harder than the funeral had.

  Keeping her grief so rigidly locked down had been a semi-subconscious act. Initially, for self-protection, and because the events at Caisleán had taught her that it was possible to block out horror, to pick oneself up and skate over the surface rather than delve into what lay beneath. Then, once she’d learned about the pregnancy, she had hung on to that same mechanism because of the new life growing inside her, because now all that mattered was protecting their child.

  ‘Better to let it out.’

  She’d lost count of how many people had said that.

  She did not believe it.

  When it came t
o the Coroner’s Court, however, with the protective numbing of early shock long gone, Kate found that, when Marie Coates and one of the attending paramedics gave their accounts of the accident and Rob’s injuries, she felt as if she was hearing the horrifying description of his death for the first time.

  ‘Be over soon,’ Michael, beside her, told her softly.

  Only if she blotted it out again, buried it deep.

  The verdict, as had been anticipated, was straightforward.

  Accidental death. No one to blame.

  Kate’s emotions were far more complicated. Not least those relating to Marie Coates, for whose new friendship she found she felt grateful, despite her part in Rob’s accident. As sociable as she could be in the right frame of mind, Kate had never been a chummy person, had, she supposed, many more acquaintances than real friends.

  ‘Never underestimate the value of a good woman friend,’ Bel had once told her.

  Another sample, Kate thought now, of her mother’s wisdom.

  And felt, some twenty-two weeks into her own pregnancy, quite overwhelmed by a suddenly intense gratitude for her, too.

  * * *

  The call from Martin Blake came first – at nine thirty in the morning a week after the inquest – to let Kate know that the trial was scheduled to begin on the eleventh February, but to reassure her that she did not, at this early stage, need to concern herself with any preparations.

  Bel telephoned, five minutes later, to ask if Kate had heard Marie’s bad news.

  ‘There was a terrible fire,’ she said. ‘Her flat’s been completely gutted.’

  ‘Is she all right?’ Kate was dismayed.

  ‘She’s fine,’ Bel told her. ‘She was out, thank God, but still, you can imagine.’

  Certainly Kate could imagine. The ramifications for anyone would be dreadful enough, but for a disabled person who must, presumably, have had special equipment fitted in her home, who’d probably taken years to get everything just so for her safety and comfort . . . And such a loss was bound to be an added burden for a woman as independent as Marie Coates.

  ‘I wonder,’ she said, on impulse, ‘if she might like to come and stay here.’

  ‘Goodness,’ Bel said. ‘You need to think about an offer like that.’

  ‘I know,’ Kate agreed. ‘But we do have a sofa bed in the office.’ Conscious of the ‘we’ she moved swiftly on. ‘And the shower’s downstairs, isn’t it, so it should work in theory.’