Out of Sight

by Isabelle Grey

  ‘But surely this is the heart of it?’ Belinda appealed to Cutler and Beverley. ‘It’s stuck in my head all night, going round and round, Geoffrey telling Patrick, get rid of him!’ She turned to Patrick, who shrank back into his chair. ‘He said get rid of him. That’s why this happened!’

  ‘No,’ groaned Patrick. ‘No, it’s not their fault. It’s nothing to do with them. Don’t start that. Don’t. Please. Don’t bring them into it. It’s my fault. I’m the only one responsible. There’s no one to blame but me.’

  ‘But—’

  Cutler held up a hand and Belinda, accepting his authority, held back her words. Heavy tears began to run down her cheeks, and she wiped them aside as if they were some irritation unconnected with her. ‘We will need to talk to your parents.’ Cutler ignored Patrick’s cry of protest. ‘If you could write down their contact details and where they’re staying.’

  ‘Have they been told?’ asked Belinda, looking to Patrick.

  He took a deep breath. ‘Not yet.’ There was silence as everyone looked at him. ‘They’re in Weybridge.’ He thought for a moment. ‘There’ll be a train, I suppose.’

  ‘We’d like you to be interviewed by a forensic psychologist, Mr Hinde. I’ll get in touch as soon as we can set up an appointment.’

  Cutler and the social worker got to their feet. Cutler assured Belinda that she could call him at any time if there was anything she wanted to ask; that they would keep her informed of everything that was happening; and that, probably the day after the post-mortem, they would be able to spend time with Daniel if they so wished, and could make funeral arrangements as soon as his body had been released by the coroner. Patrick sat on, immobile, an image of his mother’s face turning to him in distress playing repeatedly in his head.

  As the others prepared to leave, he finally found a voice. ‘I can’t do it. You don’t understand. It’s impossible to speak to them.’

  When Patrick raised his head, he saw the three of them regarding him with varying degrees of baffled pity. Suddenly he was a small boy again, at the start of the summer holidays, alone at his bedroom window, one hand clutching the dusty linen of the toile de Jouy curtains as he looked out at his mother’s taxi driving away.

  Patrick sat down beside Agnès, tolerating the wait while Geoffrey made a business out of ordering him a soft drink. It had been a short walk from Weybridge station to the hotel, which he found to be just the kind of place he’d expect his father to select; once presumably a coaching inn, it was now trying too hard to appear modern. He was glad he had been able to prepare himself for this task alone. Immediately after Cutler’s visit, Grace had come downstairs carrying Belinda’s overnight bag, and soon afterwards had taken Belinda away to stay with her. Now he had found his parents in the small lounge area. Allowing himself the cowardice of a contained public space in which to release such news he had chosen not to suggest that they go upstairs or out for a walk. Taking his mother’s hand, he began his explanation.

  ‘Maman, Dad, there’s no other way to tell you. Something’s happened to Daniel.’ Agnès’ manicured nails dug into the flesh of his palm. ‘He’s gone,’ Patrick said quietly. ‘He died.’

  ‘Is that why you didn’t call us back?’ demanded Geoffrey. Patrick closed his eyes. When he opened them again, he could see that Geoffrey regretted his words but had no clue as to how he might recover himself. Patrick leant across and patted his father’s arm.

  ‘It’s all right, Dad. I guess you’ve been worrying. I’m sorry.’

  Geoffrey nodded like some Chinese mandarin toy, trying gruffly to compose himself. Patrick turned to his mother, ready to soothe and reassure. Yet, though her eyes had widened in alarm, they remained clear: always anticipating catastrophe, now it had struck, maybe she would not after all lose control. ‘My poor boy,’ she said, and Patrick realised with a terrible inward collapse of resolve that she meant him, her own son. ‘Mon pauvre Patrice. To lose your little one. I understand how you must feel. But you must tell us the rest when you are able.’

  His mother’s sympathy, so seldom available to him throughout his life, was sad and disorienting. He forced himself to stick to the words he had rehearsed during his journey in the tawdry, litter-strewn train. ‘I have to tell you now, Maman. There are other people who will want to speak to you.’

  ‘Why? What happened?’ Geoffrey’s voice was harsh.

  ‘You’ll have to decide for yourselves. I left Daniel in the car. I forgot he was there.’ He ignored Agnès’ cry and ploughed on. ‘The cause of death was heatstroke and dehydration. I am solely responsible.’

  Geoffrey sagged into the plush hotel armchair, looking suddenly old and frail. ‘We’re due back in Geneva next week,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘So what about the funeral?’ Geoffrey persisted.

  ‘Apparently there has to be an inquest or something first.’ Patrick heard his own words as squalid and sordid, but kept going. ‘We were warned it might be weeks. Or even longer.’

  Geoffrey stared at him aggressively, and Patrick recognised this as a symptom of shock. Agnès rose uneasily to her feet, her expression bleak. ‘We don’t need to discuss this now, do we?’ she asked her husband, who nodded his agreement with apparent indifference. ‘Not here, like this.’ Unused to following his mother’s lead, Patrick rose too, and she gave him a short, fierce hug, the kindness of which made him tremble.

  ‘Who is it we have to see?’ asked Geoffrey, levering himself out of his chair with unaccustomed difficulty.

  ‘A Detective Inspector Cutler. He’s been very decent.’

  ‘When is that likely to be? We’ll need to be told if we’re to change our travel arrangements.’

  ‘Soon, I suppose. I’ll let him know your plans.’

  ‘We’ll be ready.’ Geoffrey drew himself up, and Patrick could picture his father preparing himself, brushing the jacket of his good suit, straightening his silk tie, pulling out his shirt-cuffs, doing all he could, thought Patrick poignantly, to save his train wreck of a son.

  ‘Go now,’ said Agnès, pushing Patrick from her. He was amazed that the expected collapse had not materialised. He glanced across at his father who, thinking himself unobserved, was shaking his head in despair. ‘You’ll be tired,’ Agnès went on. ‘I understand the tiredness. Go now, Patrice. Look after yourself, and Belinda.’

  Geoffrey mumbled his farewells, his gaze fixed on the carpet. Ashamed at preferring this resigned fatalism to one of his father’s impotent rages, Patrick made his way out of the hotel. He walked back to the station with his shoulders bent stiffly forwards, shielding his heart, afraid to straighten his spine in case he jarred the brimming pain.

  Belinda came back unannounced from her sister’s the following day. The principal at the school where she taught had assured her that, with so few days of the summer term remaining, there was no reason for her to return before September. She had offered to take it on herself to cancel Belinda’s private lessons, if she so wished.

  At home, Belinda and Patrick moved around one other in as diplomatic and courteous a way as possible; while she had been in London, he had moved all he needed into the spare room, which she accepted without comment. They continued by tacit consent to share mundane tasks, staring like zombies into the fridge or putting clothes into a washing machine whose simple controls had morphed into indecipherable hieroglyphics. Only their inability to comprehend fully the finality of their bereavement got them through the empty days together. Belinda overheard his instructions to the local garage to pick up their Renault as soon as the police released it, to repair the broken windows and then drop it off for sale at a car auction, but said nothing, just as she wordlessly absorbed his unspoken resolve not to get in a car even as a passenger, although she remained willing to take a taxi or accept a lift from friends.

  Patrick did not care to investigate whether his gratitude was for her absence of comment or because she accepted his avoidance. The one comfort he allowed himself was to
take long baths, sometimes two or three a day. He would lie, relieved of all effort of will, watching his naked limbs float in the tepid undemanding water as he tried – and failed – to submerge his consciousness in the featureless element.

  Although friends arrived unannounced to drop off home-cooked meals, averting their gaze and hurrying away, eventually Belinda and Patrick had to draw up a list for the supermarket. They struggled to imagine future needs; once there and faced with a plethora of choices, they stared helplessly at the packed shelves, not knowing if they wanted all of it or none. As they moved along the aisles, they crafted their faces to hide their confusion from those pushing trolleys alongside them, people who seemed to feel no absurdity in belonging here, in making precise choices among varieties of crispness, flavour or scentedness. Patrick marvelled how he had ever viewed this neon-lit, air-conditioned realm as mundane. Their mutual bewilderment bonded them, gave them something to share, and they sat beside one another on the bus home, embracing bags of fruit, milk and loo rolls on their laps, feeling the comradeship of strangers in a strange land.

  When his nightmares began, they were not about Daniel. The hours of darkness when he was able to bring Daniel back, could re-live his intoxicating smell, his laugh, his sturdy limbs, the absolute trust with which his son had allowed himself to be carried in his father’s arms – those nights provided fleeting moments of serenity, almost of happiness. He knew they were just dreams, waking reveries, but he didn’t care. So long as he didn’t open his eyes and could imagine Daniel’s warm breathing presence beside him, then some vital morsel of his soul felt less bereft. The nightmares came when he was most deeply asleep. Though he was often awoken by his own screaming, he was certain that they were not about the discovery of Daniel’s body – he re-lived those minutes in the yard behind his office every single day when awake. All he could recall was how appalled his inner sleeping self had been by the ravages of destruction unleashed by his despotic nightmare self, but the task of delving further into his subconscious seemed insurmountable.

  Privately he celebrated the terror they inspired. He deserved to suffer; until he was told what his punishment was to be, he yearned to be shunned, cast out, banished. He could not bear it when people were kind to him. He had been amazed by the polite tolerance of relative strangers, how they would tiptoe around, mouthing well-meant platitudes when he would not have blamed them for showing all the disgust he was convinced they must feel. He secretly cherished Grace’s open condemnation, and was sure that sometimes he caught Belinda, too, looking at him as if trying to divine what truly lay concealed inside him. He shrank from her inspection before admonishing himself that he had no right to consider himself. Believing that his own feelings no longer mattered, he did his best to hide evidence of his grief from her, as she mostly did from him. If, on entering a room, he came upon her weeping noisily, her mouth ugly and twisted, her eyes blind and swollen, oblivious to his existence, he would quietly close the door and go away, believing that because he was the cause of her agony, he had no right to offer comfort.

  They agreed they must visit Daniel’s childminder, Christine, and walked there together. She showed them into her small front room, which looked threadbare without the usual run-around mess of busy children, and, as if she had been waiting for a signal, almost immediately broke down. ‘I should have realised something was wrong,’ she wept. ‘That you would have rung me if there’d been some glitch. I should have done something. Not just assumed. Got hold of Belinda at work. Something.’

  Convinced that Christine could only recoil from his pariah’s touch, Patrick withheld the healer’s impulse to reach out to her. She looked at him tearfully. ‘If only I’d done more. I’m so sorry. I hope you forgive me,’ she said with dignity.

  Her innocent sorrow almost made him swoon, but, bracing himself against his own emotion, he spoke firmly. ‘Christine, you must never think like that. You left messages for me. I am solely to blame for what happened. You did all you could.’

  Belinda gave a small nod of assent – he had done the right thing. Christine looked at him doubtfully, but he could see, as he had often observed with his patients, that she was ready to accept absolution.

  ‘Daniel loved coming here,’ he told her.

  ‘He was such a cutie-pie,’ she agreed.

  They sat awkwardly, with little else to say. As they got up to go, Belinda handed over an envelope containing some money Christine was owed. ‘It helps no one for you to be out of pocket,’ Belinda murmured, pressing it into her hands. ‘And there’s a photo in there I thought you might like to keep,’ she added, making it gracefully impossible for Christine to do anything but accept with thanks.

  ‘Did you notice,’ Belinda remarked as they left the house together, ‘that she’d tidied away every single toy? Trying to save our feelings, probably.’

  Before they walked away, she looked back wistfully, and Patrick guessed her thoughts: despite the intimate connections between Daniel and this house, they had no reason ever to come here again. Indeed, if truth be told, they were likely to be unwanted visitors, trailing with them as they now did such unwelcome knowledge of the world.

  As they wound their way home through the Edwardian terraced streets, they passed several women pushing children in buggies or unlocking front doors with shopping bags at their feet and a child balanced on one hip. Patrick’s gaze ran over them without interest: none of them was Daniel.

  ‘There’s something I need to understand,’ said Belinda suddenly. ‘About Geoffrey, when he told you to get rid of Daniel.’

  ‘He didn’t mean any harm,’ said Patrick automatically.

  ‘I need you to explain why it doesn’t make you angry.’

  He sighed. ‘I’m used to him, I suppose.’

  ‘I wanted to strike him down for it.’

  ‘It’s his anxiety. He can’t bear it when Maman gets anxious, that’s all. He’s worse than her.’

  ‘But it must make you feel something?’

  ‘You can’t blame Dad, Belinda.’

  ‘I’m not. I’m trying to make sense of what happened to you. Was it about Geoffrey?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know that it was about anything.’

  ‘There has to be a reason.’

  ‘Maybe there isn’t. I’ve gone over and over and over. I wish I could tell you some reason, but I can’t.’

  ‘I have to understand what went on inside you that morning. You would never have just left Daniel. There is an explanation, some key to this, I know there is.’

  Patrick focused on the distant glitter of sea between the houses, fighting the urge to run.

  ‘Help me, Patrick. If I can’t make some sense of it, I’m lost.’

  It took every bit of strength he possessed, but he stopped and placed his hands lightly on her shoulders. It was the first time he had touched her since he had driven away that morning, a mere few days earlier, but she did not flinch.

  ‘Just give me time,’ he beseeched her. ‘I’ll try, I promise. I’ll do anything you want. I’ll do my best to help you. I will. But right now I don’t understand anything.’

  Her answering look was unfathomable, and he suddenly realised that, though he loved her dearly, there were aspects of his wife that he barely knew; that, despite the ways in which he understood his patients and their troubles, there were aspects of other people he would never know.

  *

  ‘When will you start seeing patients again?’ Belinda asked that evening as, without appetite, they picked diligently at the supper Patrick had made. Evenings were difficult, each feeling Daniel’s loss delineated by the absence of the familiar routines of his supper, bath and bedtime. There was no reason to stay in alone, yet neither of them could imagine wanting or enjoying those activities – a meal out, a movie, a drink with friends – previously restricted by parenthood. ‘We’re going to need the money soon. My salary’s not enough,’ Belinda went on. ‘You can’t afford to put it off too long,’ she added careful
ly. ‘There might be some people who won’t come back.’

  Patrick wondered, but didn’t say, if any patients would choose to see him again. Though the police had so far kept the tragedy from the local media, word had obviously spread among Patrick and Belinda’s colleagues and professional contacts, and beyond. Patrick had not told Belinda that he had already received two anonymous letters calling him a monster, a murderer, unfit to be anywhere near a child ever again. When, unsuspecting, he had opened the first, his reaction had been to laugh in horror and agree with the writer’s sentiments, since his judgement of himself was much the same. When the second envelope bearing unfamiliar handwriting appeared on the mat, he had initially been tempted to destroy it unread. But he’d torn it open and scanned its contents. It had taken a slightly different tack, accusing him of resenting his son so much that he sadistically inflicted horrible suffering on him, treating him worse than a dog on such a sweltering July day. Even though both letters had been addressed to him, he was careful now always to vet the post before she could reach it.

  Patrick had been depressed by the despairing lives that must surely have lain behind the mailing of such spite. Wasn’t there enough cruelty in the world without taking the trouble to manufacture yet more? Such evidence of random hate made him chary of returning to work. Trust was essential between a homeopath and his patients, and if he himself was riven with doubt about how people now regarded him, then the bond necessary to healing might be impossible. But he couldn’t explain any of this to Belinda.

  ‘You’re right,’ he told her. ‘I’m seeing the police psychologist on Monday. Maybe I can discuss it with her.’

  She seemed content with this, and said no more. Patrick collected their plates and went to fill the sink with hot water – a reversal of their domestic convention, which was that whoever had cooked did not also wash up.