A Death Divided

by Clare Francis

Again, Joe seemed overawed by the information. ‘What happened?’ he asked humbly.

  Marc pulled a matching wooden chair away from the wall and placed it next to the hi-fi, not too close to Joe but not too far away either. Sitting down, crossing one sturdy leg over the other. Marc considered Joe with an air of studied indifference that didn’t quite stretch to his eyes, which contained a gleam of anticipation.

  ‘I’ve never told Mum and Dad.’

  ‘No, of course.’

  ‘I’ve never told anybody.’

  ‘I promise it’ll go no further,’ Joe said deferentially.

  This seemed to remind Marc of what a huge favour he was doing Joe, and he gave a condescending sniff.

  ‘I hadn’t seen Jen in an age,’ he began at last. ‘Six months maybe.’ He glanced at Joe, as if to gauge the reaction so far.

  Apparently satisfied, he went on: ‘It was Easter, I was meant to be going to France with the college, but there was a ferry strike, the trip was cancelled, and Dad was keen for me to go and see if Jen was okay. They hadn’t heard anything for weeks. Mum and Dad, and they were getting worried. So I offered to go up there, to Hereford.’ Another pause to read Joe’s expression. ‘Couldn’t get through to Jen to begin with.

  Rang dozens of times, and then of course it was him who answered, and he wouldn’t put her on, not till I made it clear I wasn’t going to give up. Took for ever before she finally came on the line, and then it was like, it’s a long way to come, are you sure you want to come all this way, that sort of thing. And all in a dead voice. Like she was brainwashed or something.’

  A heavy vehicle lumbered past the house, shaking it to the foundations, and it seemed impossible that any mortar could survive the continual barrage.

  ‘Anyway, so I got there and of course there was no one to meet me at the station—’

  ‘Sorry, Marc - when was this? How long ago?’

  ‘Must be five years? Yeah, four and a half, five at the most.’

  Marc crossed his meaty arms and settled back in his seat. Apart from the occasional glances at Joe, he kept his button gaze fixed on the window beyond Joe’s chair. He spoke in a squeaky monotone of disapproval. ‘So, I wait for the best part of an hour at the station - can’t get them on the phone of course and eventually he turns up. No apologies, needless to say. Then he runs around town, picking things up, shopping, generally farting about. Like he’s trying to waste time. Must have been two hours he kept driving around. I could see what he was up to, of course, but there was nothing I could do. Just had to sit it out. He kept talking all this crap. India, Buddhism, the state of the world - as if I was interested in hearing his views on the subject.’

  ‘But you got there eventually?’

  It didn’t take much to make Marc bristle, and he bristled now. ‘I’m explaining what happened, okay? I’m telling you it was all a scam, that he was trying to keep me away from her for as long as possible. I’m explaining, okay?’

  ‘Sorry.’

  With a tight sigh, Marc went on, ‘So when we finally got there he announced Jen was upstairs resting. That she’d be down soon. Well, it wasn’t soon, it was hours, and all the time I had to listen to him rabbiting on while he made this meal. It was evening when she finally came down. She looked like death. I mean, terrible. Skin and bone. Dark shadows. If it hadn’t been Jen, I’d have thought she was on substances.’

  Answering Joe’s frown, he snapped, ‘I’m not saying she was, okay? I’m saying she looked like it.’

  Joe nodded. ‘Sure.’

  With a last indignant glance. Marc settling his gaze on the window again. ‘She hardly said a word at dinner. She hardly had the chance. He was too quick. Watched us like a hawk and every time I tried to talk to her he cut in arid spouted all this crap. And when she did manage a word he’d pick her up on it. Sort of rubbish whatever she said. So I tried to find a way of getting her on her own—’

  Joe interrupted gently, ‘Sorry, Marc, but when you say he rubbished her, how? What sort of things did he say?’

  ‘Hey, we’re talking five years ago. I can’t give you chapter and verse after all this time.’

  ‘No. But roughly?’

  Grudgingly, Marc searched his memory. ‘I suppose it was things like, “You don’t mean that, do you?” and “You’re talking nonsense.” Stuff like that.’

  ‘And what was she trying to say when this happened?’

  ‘Well… nothing. Anything.’

  ‘I see. Thanks.’

  ‘So …’ Marc said in the tone of getting back to the business in hand. ‘I tried to get her on her own. It wasn’t easy.

  He was like an effing shadow. But in the end I managed to catch her on her way upstairs. And of course she’d been longing to talk. Sort of pulled at my arm and broke down and begged for help. Wanted right out. There and then.’

  ‘What do you mean, wanted out?’

  ‘Said she couldn’t go on. Said she couldn’t live like that any more. Asked me to help get her out. Get her to the police.

  Otherwise she was ready to jack it all in. I might not have got the exact words, okay? But near enough.’

  ‘But… why the police?’

  ‘For protection,’ Marc replied as if it was glaringly obvious.

  ‘To keep him away.’

  ‘She actually said that?’

  He looked at the floor. ‘Well, yeah,’ he argued with sulky ferocity. ‘She wanted the police. She wanted protection.’

  There were times when Marc stared unflinchingly at you and times when he couldn’t meet your eye, but Joe couldn’t decide which, if any, went with the truth.

  ‘ ‘Course, I said she could rely on me a hundred per cent,’

  Marc resumed with bad humour. ‘That I’d get her out straight away. Right there and then. And I would have too. But the moment I said it, she began to panic. Started saying it would be difficult. That he wouldn’t like it. That he would try and stop her. Basically, she ended up doing a complete U-turn. No, no, she didn’t want to go anywhere. No, I wasn’t to take any notice of what she’d said. No, she was fine. No, she was just a bit stressed, that was all. The real reason she was backtracking, of course, was that she’d heard him coming to look for her.

  That’s how much he scared her! She only had to hear him coming.’

  Joe tried to imagine Jenna in the role of oppressed wife, but the image wouldn’t form and it seemed to him that after all this time he couldn’t even conjure up her face with any accuracy.

  ‘I tried to keep her talking,’ Marc declared with a hint of pride, ‘but he hustled her off to bed. Then he came back and insisted we have a brandy together. You know, man-to-man stuff. Tried to pump me on what Jen had said. Gave me all this junk about her not being well and the best thing was peace and quiet, that she’d been upset over the death of a friend and needed time to get over it, that he was looking after her all right and not to take anything she said too seriously. Well, I thought, he would say that, wouldn’t he? But I wasn’t going to be put off that easily. No way. And I wouldn’t have, either, if-‘

  Joe risked an interruption. ‘Did he say how this friend had died?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did Jenna?’

  Marc tightened his prim mouth. ‘I’m coming to that.

  Okay?’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘So …’ He took a moment to find his thread. ‘I was ready to get her out, no question. But the next morning, Jen was well, not sweetness and light exactly, but sort of through the storm. Still not like the old Jen, still quiet, but no sign of panic, and sort of smiling serenely. I asked her if she was on medication, because that was what it looked like to me, like she was on uppers and downers and everything in between. But she said no, she just had bad patches, that was all, and she was sorry I’d been there at the wrong moment and happened to see one, because it looked much worse than it really was. I told her it couldn’t have looked much worse if she’d tried, and she mustn’t put up with him a second longer, not if she
had any self-respect, that she must pack her bags and I’d order a taxi and we’d leave straight away. But she said she didn’t want to do that, she said she was fine, she wanted to stay right there.

  Well, I wasn’t going to give up that easily. No way.’ Marc gave an emphatic snort. ‘I argued with her. Gave her a hard time.

  But I was never going to win, I knew that the moment she began making him out to be a frigging saint. Talked about how good he was to her, how he took care of her, how lucky she was to have him. Lucky, for shit’s sake! She went on like that, I mean for a long time. Talking as if she was the bad person. I looked it up on the Internet. Victim mentality.

  Battered wife syndrome. They always think it’s their fault, that they’re not trying hard enough, that they’re no good, that they’re unworthy. And you can’t tell them otherwise. They won’t listen. It’s like an addiction, a need to be punished, a sublimated desire for abasement.’ He said abruptly, ‘No need to look at me like that, Joe. I’m only telling you what it says on the Internet! I’m only giving you the medical definition.’

  Joe picked up his coffee and drained it before he could say something he might regret.

  ‘You can read it yourself!’ Marc insisted.

  ‘Sure.’ Joe got to his feet.

  Marc stood up too, but irritably, like someone who’s about to be denied his punchline. ‘Well, there was nothing more I could do, was there? There was no way she was going to leave, and that was that. I thought of calling the police but it wouldn’t have done any good. She’d only have said everything was fine and made me look like a prat. So—’

  ‘And this guy who died? What did she say about him?’

  On the sofa, the girl, evidently despairing of the conversation ever coming to an end, gave a sharp sigh and reached for the remote control.

  ‘Not a lot,’ Marc said. ‘You know the way Jen was - liked everything in the garden to be rosy. Couldn’t take rain on her parade. She didn’t want to talk about this guy. Said something like, it was terrible, then blanked it out the way she did with anything nasty. Can’t say I entirely blame her, the way he died—’ The hi-fi came back on, blaring pop music, and Marc snarled at the girl to keep it down. Then, with an air of getting back to the real agenda: ‘So when I got home I had to face Mum and Dad. Had to find something to tell them. Said Jen was wrapped up in her life, very busy, and was going to do her best to come and see them when she had the chance. They couldn’t understand it of course, but I took a judgement that anything was better than the truth. After that … well, I did what I could to keep in contact with Jen. Tried calling - oh, once a week? Till she disappeared. But it was like this wall.

  She never answered. Never returned my messages. So … that was it! Done all I could!’ he finished on a note of self-justification.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Don’t see how I could have done more.’

  ‘No,’ said Joe obediently. ‘But then she rang on Monday.

  Thank God you were in the house when she called.’

  The old caution clouded Marc’s face. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘How did she sound?’

  ‘Like I told you, it’s all with the police. I can’t discuss it.’

  Nodding absent-mindedly, Joe asked casually, ‘But it was Monday?’

  Marc gave a foxy look to show he wasn’t going to be caught out as easily as that. ‘I told you. I can’t say.’

  ‘Ah’ - as if understanding at last. ‘Right.’

  Either the CD had skipped a track or the girl had notched up the volume, because a blast of music suddenly filled the room and this time Marc didn’t tell her to turn it down. Taking his cue, Joe made his way through the kitchen to the back door, feeling Marc’s eyes boring into his back as he came along behind. ‘Oh, this guy Sam,’ Joe began, as if the question had just occurred to him. ‘Did Jenna say how he came to drown?’

  Marc scowled at him.

  Joe tried again. ‘How he came to be so close to the water?’

  It might have been a trick question for all the suspicion Marc was showing. ‘What the shit are you talking about?’

  ‘The river … how he came to be swept away.’

  ‘She didn’t say anything about drowning. He fell from a dam. That’s what she told me.’

  Joe didn’t let anything show in his expression. ‘A dam?’

  ‘Yeah. He was prancing around on some sort of dam and he fell onto rocks. Crash. Splat. She didn’t say anything about drowning.’

  Joe found himself nodding. ‘Right…’ Then, as Marc continued to stare at him as if he was a lunatic: ‘I must have misheard … before.’

  Joe would have started off down the slimy path, but Marc cried in a scornful tone, ‘So it’s going to be no sale, is it?

  Jenna’s not going to be allowed to sell the house?’

  ‘I think there’s likely to be a problem while the police are involved.’

  ‘Well, you can tell your friend I don’t give a monkey’s about the house. It’s Jen I care about. Tell him that!’

  Wearily, Joe replied, ‘Sure, Marc. Sure. I understand.’

  The alarm sounded from a dark and cruel place. Waking, Joe registered several things. That he’d slept for barely an hour, that if he was to have any hope of sleeping through the British night he must make the effort to get up and stay up for at least three hours. That he had set the alarm on snooze, which meant he could doze for a while longer. That Sarah was moving around the kitchen, getting the dinner ready. That in normal circumstances this would have been enough to get him straight out of bed and into the shower, but when she’d arrived she’d been in a strange mood, stressed and a little short with him, and said she needed time to unwind. He supposed she’d had a bad week, and made a mental note to ask her about it. His final thought was that the central heating was clunking like the Anvil Chorus and he should complain to the managing agents, though with only three days to Christmas there wasn’t a hope in hell of getting anything done about it.

  The jetlag had dragged at him all the way back to London.

  He drove with the windows wide open and the heating off.

  Even then, he had to stop somewhere near Peterborough and force down more coffee, and douse his face in water. On the road again, he listened to the radio and played some music, but mainly he drove to the thrumming of the wind and the cold air against his face while he tried to make sense of his day.

  He could get no perspective on Chetwood at all. He had seemed both the same and quite different. Philosopher, joker, commercial operator, conscience of the world; each image fitted him as effortlessly - or as badly - as the one before. For every moment that he’d seemed like his old self - the sparks of humour, the intellectual meanderings, the easy manner -

  there’d been a moment when he might have been a stranger, cool, detached, abrupt.

  And what to make of his explanations? That Jenna was happy with her strange isolated life, that she didn’t want contact with ‘people’ - all people? some people? particular people? - that she wasn’t able to forgive herself for something that had happened over four years ago. How much did you have to love someone to grieve for that long? How could you feel such a huge weight of responsibility for what was, after all, an accident? Perhaps her need for solitude owed more to a nervous breakdown than a crisis of conscience, but, fearful of the stigma, no one wanted to call it by its proper name.

  In the past, Jenna’s bouts of unhappiness had been shortlived if intense affairs. What was it Marc had said? Couldn’t take rain on her parade. Joe remembered a day when Jenna’s rain had come in a thunderburst. It was spring, April or May.

  They were both seventeen. Joe was sure about that because, against all his own expectations, he’d passed his driving test that morning and, as with every landmark event in his life, he’d gone straight to the Laskeys to tell them. As he hurried round to the back door, the congratulations were already resounding in his head, the celebratory cake - a speciality of Helena’s - was already sweet in his mout
h. He found Helena in the kitchen, just as he’d hoped, but there it ended. Her smile was perfunctory, she made a rueful face as she reached for the phone to make a call. ‘We’re in a state,’ she remarked heavily.

  ‘Jenna didn’t get the part.’

  In the hall Joe met Marc coming in from school with a crash of the front door. They would have passed each other with nothing more than a glance, but they were both halted by the sound of Jenna crying in the front room and the murmur of Alan’s voice as he tried to comfort her. ‘She didn’t get the part,’ Joe explained.

  Marc’s eye$ rolled expressively, his face puckered in cold scorn. He looked down at the sheet of art paper in his hand, some painting effort with a gold star fixed to one corner, and, letting it fall against his leg, trudged off up the stairs.

  There was no consoling Jenna. When Joe put his head round the door, Alan beckoned him in with relief. ‘Here’s Joe!’

  he exclaimed. ‘He’ll tell you! Won’t you, Joe? He’ll tell you it’s nothing to do with your abilities. Nothing to do with your talents. They just felt it was time to give someone else a turn.

  Isn’t that right, Joe?’

  But Jenna wasn’t having it. ‘The whole school thought I was getting the part,’ she sobbed from inside her hands.

  ‘Everyone! Just everyone! And now they’ll all laugh at me.’

  ‘Not if you walk tall,’ Joe said. ‘Not if you show you don’t care.’

  She glared up at him through red-rimmed eyes. ‘But I do care! I do! They gave the part to Kirn Newton. And she can’t even sing! Why do they hate me so much, Joe? Why have they done this to me?’

  ‘No one hates you, Jenna. But they know you have a brilliant future. They think of you as different. I’m sure Alan’s right, I’m sure they just wanted to give someone else a chance.’

  ‘But I don’t want to be different, Joe. I want to be like everyone else!’

  Days later, when school had been endured and more bitter tears shed, she said in a rare moment of calm, ‘I don’t want a brilliant future, Joe. Not if it’s going to be like this. Not if people are going to hate me for it.’

  They were walking home from the bus stop under the violent pink of the cherry blossom. He slipped a hand behind her elbow, trying to hold it unobtrusively. Even then he dreaded gossip and the risk it would get back to Jenna’s ears.