by C F Dunn
“I was just saying, Hugh, that I swear I spoke to Dr Lynes some thirty years ago. Either that or he has mastered cloning. And the man I spoke to was Matthew, not Henry. A bit of a coincidence, don’t you think – same name, same face, same profession?”
I sensed Dad’s quickening interest. “Really? That is a coincidence.”
Matthew shook his head, and to my surprise, a broad smile replaced the frown. “I’m afraid there’s no mystery – my father and I share the same name as well as the same calling. Matthew Henry Lynes: like father, like son – a tradition among some of our families in the States. The confusion was bad enough when I was young, but when I qualified it became impossible. He adopted his second name to preserve his sanity. It’s quite understandable how we could be mistaken for one another; we are so similar after all.” His voice dropped and smoothed as he spoke, the persuasive tones slipping out woven deceit among willing believers. Everyone stared at him as if mesmerized, the last notes lingering in the silence.
An early bee hummed, breaking the spell. Dad cleared his throat noisily. “He is too,” he agreed, “and a damn good surgeon to boot. I expect we’re all ready for something to eat. Will you join us, Mike? Penny didn’t want a wake so it’s just the family.”
To my relief Mike took the hint even though Dad hadn’t meant it as one. “Thanks, but I won’t impose on you.” He took in Matthew’s distinctive features again, before conceding defeat. “My mistake, Dr Lynes. I’m afraid age is uncompromising; it has a habit of playing tricks as one gets older. As Beth said, it would be ridiculous.” He then smiled, wished us luck and, kissing Mum fondly on both cheeks, bade us farewell, taking with him the cloud of suspicion.
“What happens when the lies catch up with you, Matthew?”
We had consumed the simple lunch prepared the evening before by Beth and Rob, and now Matthew and I finished the washing up. My sister was putting Archie down for a sleep, the twins were out with Dad and their father to run off excess energy, and Mum was resting. We had the kitchen to ourselves.
Shirt sleeves rolled up his forearms, his fair skin glistening with soapsuds, Matthew handed me a tureen to dry. “They don’t, not very often. It takes two to dissemble, Emma – one to deceive and another to believe the deception. Give people a convenient truth and, more often than not, they’ll believe it.”
I handed him the old, stapled tureen lid with its worn gold top-knot, remembering, with a wrench, the last time I had seen Nanna lift it off steaming vegetables a year ago – a year ago this Easter. “How many times have you been recognized like Mike did today?”
Sweeping the sponge over the crazed surface, he rinsed the lid and gave it to me. “Not often, but enough to know what is a passing curiosity I can deal with, and what’s not.”
“And when it’s not, what then?”
“Then my choices are limited: to remove the obstruction, or to run.”
Obstruction?
The door swung open as Beth, cheerfully replenished by a second glass of wine at lunch, came in with a stray fork. “Is someone going for a run?” She leaned between us and plopped the fork into the water. She picked up a tea towel. “Want a hand? Rob’s gone to the café to get things ready for tea. Everyone’s always hungry after a funeral – I know I am.” Her breezy act fooled no one except the twins; inside she hurt. She wanted to keep busy, but I needed clarity from Matthew.
“No thanks, we’re just about finished here. Do you want to see if Mum is up yet?”
She flicked the towel at me. “I know when I’m not wanted. I’ll leave you two love-doves alone, shall I? Not for long, though,” she flourished a finger. “Dad and I have been plotting, and then there’s your dress – I want to know what you’re wearing.”
I groaned. The wedding. With Nanna’s death there hadn’t been the opportunity to tell them we were getting married in Maine. This was going to be fun.
“You can’t escape, Em; come on, we have to have something to look forward to.”
I smiled weakly. “Later, Beth, OK?”
“OK,” she shrugged and left us alone.
“Obstruction, Matthew?”
He gave me the fork without meeting my eyes. His arm felt slippery wet under my hand, ominous strength in the unyielding muscles. “I could kill you so easily,” he told me once. “I could squeeze the life out of you and no one would know; my secret would be safe.”
“Remove an obstruction – how?”
He looked at my hand on his arm, and touched the stone of my ring. “In the last resort I will do whatever I have to, to protect those I love.”
“You would kill?”
He let the water out of the sink, took the fork from me, and dried it.
“We’re done here,” he stated, and with that ended the discussion.
I tried not to brood on it and, having watched him ease my mother’s grief through gentle conversation, I found it hard to believe him capable of ending someone’s life. This considerate, compassionate man, who strove to relieve the suffering of others, was no killer and yet was prepared to kill. I had seen how close he had come to killing Staahl. What would drive him to such extremes again? Where would he draw the line and, once crossed, would there be any way back for him to healing, to acceptance and forgiveness? My fingers sought my cross and, with a sough, remembered its loss. I found a strand of hair instead, and wound it around my finger. Matthew had been a soldier once – he had received orders and, in turn, commanded others in war. He killed in the line of duty; would he do so again autonomously?
“A penny for them, Em?”
“Hmm?” I came to. “Do you think Dad is capable of killing someone, Beth?”
She choked. “Dad? Where did that come from?” She coughed again and I leaned forward to thump her back.
“It just occurred to me that having been in the Army he must have accepted that one day he might have to.”
“Yeah, but only under orders, Em. He wouldn’t just go out and… kill someone… randomly.”
“Does being under orders make it any more acceptable? Isn’t it abrogating responsibility?”
Her brow puckered. “I don’t think so. Golly, you pick your moments. Look, for what it’s worth, I think there are exceptions to the ‘thou shalt not kill’ rule and one of them is defending what you believe in and your right to believe it. That’s what Dad was doing when he was in the Army. I’d kill if I had to.”
“You would?”
“I’d kill to defend my family, Em. Wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t anyone?”
The twins rolled the baby on his back and attacked him with tickles. Who wouldn’t want to defend them if push came to shove? But at what cost?
A resounding crash, followed by a string of mild oaths, emanated from the room next door. Beth wearily levered herself to her feet. “That’d be Rob; I’d better go and see what havoc he’s wrought this time.”
“I’ll deal with it, Beth; leave it.”
She waved me back. “You look after Arch, I’ll clear up. I know who has the better deal.”
The baby and I regarded each other warily from across the room. I smiled – he frowned.
By the time Rob called us in for tea, Archie and I had come to a mutual understanding: he wouldn’t wail if I didn’t try to entertain him, which suited us both. He spent the intervening time beaming at Matthew, which was pretty annoying, but very convenient. He hauled himself unsteadily upright and batted Matthew’s knee for attention in much the same way our old cat did to me.
Matthew bent down to pick him up in a movement so natural, so unconsciously normal, it made my attempts to bond with my nephew appear clumsy. The baby snuggled against him, playing with the buttons on his shirt, his eyelids fluttering as he drifted towards sleep.
Archie had just dropped off when Alex accidentally decapitated Barbie against a chair leg. Flora scowled at the mutilated torso, contemplating the choice between exacting biblical revenge on her brother or playing for sympathy from the adults. Clasping the severed head in on
e hand, Alex eyed his sister, weighing up his chances of survival. I leant over from where I sat and extracted the head and held out my hand for the body. “This reminds me, Flora,” I said, scooping the enviably shiny hair from the neck of the doll, “of something Sir Walter Raleigh said just before his execution.” Immediately intrigued by the mention of a violent death, Flora forgot to be cross. “He said, ‘So the heart be right, it is no matter which way the head lieth.’” I popped it back in place and viewed the result. “Which is just as well, because I’ve just put her head on back-to-front.” Flora giggled and twisted the doll’s head until her chin pointed over her exorbitant breasts.
“That’s OK, Emma, her heart and head are in the right place now.” She gave me a kiss, then turned around and whacked her brother with the doll.
Yes, I thought, watching the siblings tussle, for the first time in my life, that’s how I feel – my head and my heart are in the right place. I smiled quietly, realizing the truth of it, and looked up to find Matthew watching me over the baby’s sunset hair with an expression of absolute tenderness.
I went to see Mum in her room and her brittle smile seemed as fragile as eggshell, but her rest had helped even out the dips and bumps of bereavement and now, with the funeral behind her, she had discovered a sad equilibrium on which to ride out her mourning.
“I can’t explain how it feels,” she said in the few moments when we were alone in her room sitting on the edge of her bed, the old-fashioned eiderdown still rucked from her rest, “but the closest I can come is to describe it as desolation. I feel so alone, Emma – I feel orphaned.” Her careworn face crumpled and my heart ached for her because I remembered how it had been after Grandpa died and my world imploded. It hadn’t mattered that my parents were still alive, my sister, my family – he had been my glue, and when he died I came unstuck and no amount of fixing could make me whole again. Those cracks had been as evident as fault lines in the earth, scars that only time would erase from the surface, but still apparent in the deep fissures of my psyche. I understood and, as she leant against me and wept, without thinking I reached inside her to where she was drowning, and fed her the new hope I had found.
“There now,” she said after a few minutes, wiping her eyes on a little linen hanky and sitting up, “what would Nanna say if she saw me being so self-indulgent?”
“She would say that it’s time for a cup of tea and a little something to set the world a-right.”
She gave a broken laugh. “She would too, and she would be quite right. I feel much better now, darling – almost back to normal.”
“It’s OK to be sad, Mum; it’ll take time.”
Tucking her hanky back in her sleeve, she stood briskly. “Yes, that’s all very well but we have your wedding to prepare for. There’s nothing quite like a wedding to keep one’s mind occupied. First things first – tea and then plans.”
CHAPTER
9
In the Dog House
The children stared goggle-eyed. “We didn’t know what to do so we did a bit of everything,” Beth explained as we scanned the heaving table. “A trad afternoon tea, Lincolnshire-style – for Nanna,” she added.
Mum’s eyes welled. “Nanna would have loved it, thank you, darlings.” She sat in her usual place with her back to the French windows. “I’m not sure if I can do it justice.”
Beth adopted her efficient, motherly voice. “No, but you can give it a good go. Places everyone, please. Alex, Flora – wash hands.”
Nanna might as well have been sitting there with us, surrounded as we were by all that she loved: her mother’s Coalport tea service as dainty as she had been, the silver teapot with the ebony handle and a little dent in the side where Grandpa had dropped it. The Victorian sugar bowl with lion paw feet had been a peace offering, and Nanna had laughed when he had given it to her and said that he could drop the teapot anytime he liked. And one of her favourite pieces – the three-tier cake stand in vibrant pink Beth and I thought she would like one year, when I was about six. We had bought it in the market one Saturday morning and it had taken all our pocket-money. I cried when I chipped it on the way home, but Nanna seemed so pleased and she never failed to use it. She always used lacy doilies, she said, because they looked so pretty against the pink, but I suspected it was to hide the chip. It was covered now in an assortment of delicate cakes and sandwiches – smoked salmon sandwiches with cream cheese on buttered bread cut as thin as cloud and as white. Flora’s hand darted out.
“Flora!” Beth remonstrated. “You must wait until Granny says.”
Mum stroked Flora’s curls. “Poor darlings, you must be so hungry. I wonder if Matthew would mind if we started? Would he think us awfully rude?”
“He said not to wait, Mum. He won’t leave Archie until he thinks he’s settled.”
Beth snorted. “Golly, won’t he? I certainly would, little monster. I swear he does it to wind me up. I hope he’s not mucking Matthew about. Rob, perhaps you ought to go and check, then he can come and have tea. You can have yours when Arch is asleep.”
Rob rolled his eyes and deposited the napkin he had just unfolded back on the table. “Thanks,” he said, his soft Scottish lilt now heavily laced with good-humoured sarcasm. “And there was I thinking Matthew could do with some practice with kids and I could do with something to eat.” He pushed his chair back from the table, but I blocked his exit.
“Matthew’s fine, Rob. He’ll join us when he can. There’s no point both of you missing tea and he said he’s not that hungry.”
Rob sat down and picked up his napkin again. “Matthew didn’t have any children with his first wife, did he? That would make you a stepmother.” He obviously found the idea amusing.
Mum offered Flora a sandwich as the child’s hand wavered over a petite lemon-iced cake. “Sandwich first, darling; there’re no crusts, so your wobbly tooth will manage quite nicely. Poor thing, to lose his wife so young.”
“He’s used to children; he has two nephews and a niece,” I dodged, wondering if I could change the subject. “Great sandwiches; did you make them last night?”
Beth tutted. “Honestly, Em, you haven’t a clue, have you? Rob made them this afternoon. They’d be stale otherwise.”
I found it exhausting fielding questions and still felt drained after the flight the previous day. It was bad enough having to keep up the deception over Matthew’s peculiarities, but keeping the details of his family, the trial, and my sudden near-fatal encounter with the coffee played havoc with my brain. Like elastic, tea in our family traditionally stretched endlessly. I peeked at my watch. I envied Archie, now probably fast asleep. Matthew would only be able to stay away for so long.
Rob asked me a question.
“Sorry, I didn’t catch that, Rob.”
“I said, what does Matthew drive?”
I smiled artlessly. “A car.” Alex and Flora went into fits of giggles.
“Right, OK, Miss Quick-Wit, I suppose I asked for that. What sort of car?”
I cocked my head, thinking. “It’s quite small, dark shiny red – and has two doors…”
“Sounds like a Fiat Panda, Em,” Beth guffawed.
“It might well be for all I know. It’s a dee-bee-something or other.” I could see Dad eager as a boy to tell him. “Ask Dad. He knows.” Rob swapped chairs with me so that he and Beth could discuss cars and engine capacities with Dad in tones usually adopted by religious adherents.
“Beth,” Mum called, and reluctantly she joined us in a cohort at one end of the table. Mum grasped each of our hands. “Girls, while the men are otherwise engaged – Flora and Alex, this concerns you as well… Some time ago, before Nanna became ill, she gave me a few things to give to you in case anything happened.” She held our hands more tightly and we smiled in support. “They are just little things, but they meant a lot to her and she wanted you to have something to remember her by.” She let go and bent sideways to a crocheted bag by her chair and took from it small, regular-shaped packages, w
rapped in cheerful paper with a tag. She handed us one each. I read my name in Nanna’s careful writing, a little spindly with age, as she had become. “Open them now, darlings. She had a message for each of you.”
“What about Archie?” Alex asked.
“There’s something for him too, for when he’s old enough not to chew it.”
Alex nodded, justice deemed to be served, and opened his parcel. A slight movement of air caused me to look up as Matthew slid into the chair next to me. I pushed my empty cup and a plate with a partly eaten sandwich in front of him for appearances’ sake.
“We’re having presents from Nanna,” I told him, then more quietly, “You were an age getting Archie to sleep – how long did it take, one minute or two?”
He grinned. “Thirty seconds, if that. I was making a couple of calls. I seem to have missed tea.”
“So you have. What is it, Alex?” My nephew had become very quiet. Dark eyes peeped through floppy hair.
“It’s a medal – look.” He held it out. It was Grandpa’s Victoria Cross.
Mum lifted it from its case and held it in her palm. “He won it for trying to rescue a young sapper when they came under enemy fire as they bridged a river. One of the soldiers became stuck in the mud. It was very slippery, you see, and the boy kept sliding back into the river and was becoming weaker by the minute. Shells were landing all around them, but Grandpa went back for him. That’s when he was wounded.”
“What happened to the soldier?” Alex wanted to know.
“Grandpa couldn’t save him. He was always very sorry about that, but he stayed close by until he died so that he wouldn’t be alone. Nanna wanted you to have his Victoria Cross because she said that you would always do the right thing, Alex, and you reminded her so much of your great-grandfather.” He sat back in his chair, fingering the medal, lost in thought. “Now, Flora… goodness gracious, what are you doing!”
“I’m a warrior princess. Daddy, Matthew – look at me, I’m a princess!” Flora announced, flashing a large silver letter-opener with a mother-of-pearl handle over her head like a sabre. Alex ducked just in time.