Out of Sight

by Isabelle Grey

  Observing them both, Patrick felt despondent at how little real pleasure his parents had ever found in family life, and now never would. The old gloom of responsibility settled on his shoulders. Even as a boy he had never succeeded in lightening their spirits, never managed to work out where the insurmountable difficulty lay that prevented them from being happy. He felt a tearing wound of pity for the three of them.

  Belinda called them to the table, where Geoffrey attempted to continue in the same vein. He talked randomly about their Channel crossing the next day and what route they would be taking through France, about farm shops and window cleaners, until Belinda cut across him, saying without preamble, ‘Did Patrick tell you he‘s seeing a psychologist?’

  Agnès’ fingers flew to her earrings, but, when Patrick leant across to press her hand, she looked directly at him, signalling her support. Geoffrey stared at Belinda in incomprehension.

  ‘Maybe, before you leave again for Geneva, you have things you’d like to say that might be helpful,’ Belinda suggested, looking calmly at each of them in turn. ‘Maybe now is the time to discuss things you don’t generally talk about.’

  Geoffrey looked petrified, but Agnès nodded cautiously, and Belinda waited for her to speak. ‘Agnès?’ she prompted.

  ‘Patrice knows how much we love him,’ she said, patting his hand.

  ‘I’d like to understand more about why you sent him away when he was so young,’ said Belinda blandly, though Patrick could detect how she struggled to keep her tone neutral. Such directness was unlike his wife but, he thought, looking at his father’s drawn face and his mother’s over-bright eyes, none of them were any longer like themselves. ‘How you imagined he’d react to that,’ she went on.

  ‘You sent your boy to a childminder,’ Geoffrey accused Belinda. Agnès reacted with immediate alarm.

  ‘No one is criticising you, Dad,’ cajoled Patrick. ‘What matters now,’ he appealed to Belinda, ‘is to support one another.’ But she returned his look with a resoluteness that was foreign to him.

  ‘I don’t hold with working mothers,’ insisted Geoffrey. ‘If you’d stayed at home with him, young lady, none of this would have happened.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ protested Agnès to her husband. ‘Don’t, dear. Don’t.’

  ‘See! Now you’re upsetting your mother!’

  ‘I don’t believe Patrick forgot Daniel,’ Belinda said passionately. ‘It was you he was trying to get away from!’

  Geoffrey rose to his feet, his chair scraping against the floor. ‘Is this why you asked us here? So you could accuse us of – of something?’

  ‘Sshh, Dad. Of course not. Sit down. Please.’ Patrick appealed again to Belinda. ‘We don’t need to talk like this. Let’s just enjoy our lunch.’

  Still standing, Geoffrey jabbed his finger across the table at Patrick. ‘You’re to blame! No one else!’

  ‘I know that, Dad,’ Patrick agreed contritely, ignoring Belinda’s flash of contempt. ‘Please, sit down. This isn’t helping.’

  ‘It’s not easy,’ said Agnès. ‘But we’ll all try, won’t we?’

  ‘Well …’ Geoffrey cast around for some face-saving formula and held his attention on the bowl of fruit salad on the kitchen counter. ‘Belinda’s gone to a lot of trouble,’ he conceded, sitting down. ‘Your mother doesn’t want to be ungrateful.’

  ‘We’re none of us ourselves,’ said Agnès. ‘How could we be?’

  Belinda collected up their plates, rebuffing Patrick’s offer of help, and prepared to serve the dessert, the stiff line of her mouth and uncoordinated movements betraying the futility of her fury.

  ‘It was the same when your sister died,’ said Agnès, handing a plate of fruit salad across the table to Patrick.

  He looked at her in confusion. ‘I never had a sister, Maman.’

  Agnès turned to address Belinda. ‘She was two days old. The doctors warned me when she was born that she was very poorly, not expected to live.’

  Patrick stared at her in bewilderment. ‘You never told me!’ He caught Belinda’s look of amazement. ‘I had no idea,’ he assured her.

  ‘They said it was all for the best,’ explained Agnès. ‘Your father was away on business.’ She glanced across at Geoffrey, a look of unexpected sympathy. ‘He couldn’t get back in time.’ Geoffrey sat very still, his head bowed, making no sign that he was even listening. ‘He never forgave himself.’ Agnès reached out to clasp his hand, but he recoiled from her touch, pushing his chair back clumsily.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he cried, blundering to the door. They heard him rush up the stairs, then turn the lock in the bathroom door.

  ‘Why did you never talk about this before, Maman?’

  Agnès looked surprised. ‘Your father doesn’t like to. But it was never a secret.’

  ‘You’ve never once spoken of it.’

  ‘I feared it might upset you to talk of it. And you never asked, like other children, why you had no brother or sister.’ The simplicity of her reasoning clearly made perfect sense to her.

  ‘It never occured to me,’ said Patrick, staring at her in perplexity, combing his memory for any evidence that he had known anything of this.

  ‘How old was Patrick when she was born?’ asked Belinda.

  ‘Two. The doctors told us we should have another child right away. That’s how people thought in those days. But it was too difficult.’

  Patrick was astounded at his mother’s demeanour. He had never seen her show such composure or resolve. He couldn’t determine which was greater, his shock at her revelation or the strange shyness that overcame him faced with her novel air of quiet authority.

  ‘Your father and I,’ Agnès continued, ‘we understand what it is to lose a child. Never forget that, mon petit chéri.’

  Belinda’s eyes filled with tears. Patrick sat still, trying to process his astonishment, until they all heard the sound of the bathroom door opening, then Geoffrey’s reluctant tread as he descended the stairs. Patrick was not sure he could deal with his father any more today, but when Geoffrey re-appeared, Agnès reached for the jug of cream and offered it to him as if nothing exceptional had occurred. Geoffrey busied himself with his fruit salad; stunned, the others followed suit, making no attempt to break the exhausted silence. When, finally, Belinda suggested coffee, Geoffrey announced that Agnès had a headache, and ten minutes later, to everyone’s relief, they had driven away. The next day they would be in Europe.

  Patrick stood in limbo at his front door, able neither to re-enter the house nor to walk away. It took a moment for his mind to register the sound of Belinda sobbing behind him. With limbs of lead, he went to her. She sat at the kitchen table, her head in her hands, tears splashing onto the wood between her elbows. He sat next to her, not touching, and waited, not knowing what to say.

  ‘I want Daniel back,’ she wept finally. ‘I miss him so much. I can’t bear to think of him shut away in that hospital basement all alone.’

  Patrick’s heart clenched tight, stopping his blood. ‘I know. I’d suffer every torment under the sun if I could only bring him back.’

  Belinda’s body shuddered. ‘I keep thinking of him that day, all by himself in the car, frightened and crying. Wanting me. And I wasn’t there.’

  ‘I’m the one who should’ve been there.’

  ‘And that made me think of you. It made me understand how you must have felt as a kid, what they did to you.’

  ‘No. I was okay. It wasn’t that bad. Look at them – you can’t blame them.’

  ‘All these secrets, things never spoken about. And you all play along.’ Belinda stretched out her hand to him, the first time she had offered any physical sign of absolution. Patrick took it, the touch of her fingers jolting his every nerve. ‘Did you really not know?’ she pleaded, between gasping breaths. ‘Did you not even remember your mum being pregnant?’

  ‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘Though it makes sense. Especially about Dad not being there when it happened. No wonder the poor sod
can’t cope.’

  ‘Your grandmother must’ve known.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ Patrick sighed. ‘And I suppose I must’ve been aware at some level. I assumed it was just what grownups were like, not telling you stuff.’

  ‘How could Agnès have sent you away after losing her baby? What sort of mother packs her child off at seven?’

  ‘I upset her, made her anxious. She was ill.’ He shook his head in wonderment. ‘I can’t believe she spoke of it now.’

  ‘But think of you, alone at school, wanting your mum!’ Belinda looked at him with terrible sadness. ‘How come you never get angry at them? Always defend them?’

  ‘Because I’ve caused all this, not them,’ said Patrick. ‘I’m the bad one here. The only one responsible.’

  ‘No,’ she wailed. ‘Your dad’s right. I’m just as much to blame as you are. I should have paid more attention to how seriously those two stress you out. I should’ve taken the day off. Kept Daniel at home with me that day.’

  The horror that Belinda should feel contaminated by his guilt had never crossed his mind. It pressed down on him, an unforeseen and insupportable burden.

  ‘I never looked at you properly before,’ she went on, beginning to sob again. ‘And I should. I should have seen what they’re really like. What they do to you.’

  ‘It wasn’t that.’

  ‘If I had, then he’d still be here, safe with us. It’s my fault just as much as yours.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘I can’t stop thinking,’ she wept, ‘if only I’d put his changing bag on the front seat, where you’d’ve seen it. If only I’d rung Christine.’

  ‘No!’ Patrick cried out in agony. ‘It’s not you.’

  ‘It is. It’s my fault. I left him there alone.’

  ‘Don’t say that. Don’t think it.’

  ‘Don’t tell me how to feel,’ she screamed at him. ‘You have no idea how I feel. You never did!’ Patrick recoiled from the hatred in her face. He sat in frozen penance while she choked and gasped through her tears.

  Much later that night Patrick became aware of Belinda standing over him in the dark of the guest room, shaking his shoulder. ‘You’re having another nightmare,’ she whispered. She slipped into bed beside him. Half-awake, he rolled over automatically to make room for her and stretched out an arm to pull her closer. She lay still, and he fell back to sleep with his hand resting on her night-gowned hip. When he woke in the morning and found her there, he could not look at her for shame.

  IV

  Patrick walked. The rhythmic repetition of steps helped to limit and control his thoughts. He stared at the pavements, noting the York stone or modern aggregate paving, the asphalt repairs, Victorian coal-hole covers, crushed drink cans, old tissues, cigarette ends, dog turds and, already, a few turning autumnal leaves. His eyes and feet provided sufficient occupation to leave his mind empty. He was well aware of the matter he could not think about: Daniel’s funeral. A date had been set for the inquest, after which the coroner would release his body for burial. Earlier this week Patrick and Belinda had had their first meeting with an undertaker, a man who seemed deft and intelligent, his sympathy apparently genuine. But they had left feeling bludgeoned by the obdurate reality of the choices and selections to be made. Until this point there had been no decisions about the future to discuss beyond a trip to the supermarket, and the change of focus had been raw and disorienting. Neither of them had any particular faith and Daniel had not been christened, so they had settled on a private cremation with some kind of memorial service to be arranged.

  Later that day, after their appointment with the undertaker, Patrick had gone upstairs to find that Belinda had emptied the guest room of his belongings and re-made the bed he had been occupying. He had crossed the hall, pushed open the door to the marital bedroom and, with a fatalistic acceptance, seen all his things back in their original places. Since then, he had lacked the emotional energy to work out what he felt, so had adopted the routine of going upstairs after he heard Belinda finish in the bathroom and could see that the bedroom lights were off. Once in bed, they never exchanged a word, and lay curled up back to back, barely touching. The past few nights he had hardly slept, and was fairly sure that she had not, either.

  But he could walk, his steps coming to resemble an incantation, the repetition of which drove out conscious thought. Patrick even found some perverse satisfaction in the notion of burning off energy. Despite their attempts to eat sensibly, both he and Belinda had lost weight, and he was aware that, with his long legs and dark clothes hanging loose, he was beginning to resemble a scarecrow. But he approved of his vanishing body. Now that the possibility of facing criminal charges of manslaughter or child neglect seemed increasingly unlikely, especially after he and Belinda had been interviewed by social workers who had determined that they remained fit people to care for any future children they might have, it seemed a small appeasement for his offence.

  He was on his way to see Amanda Skipton. His wish to co-operate with the police and his lingering and ambivalent desire for external punishment made it easy for him to regard these sessions as something over which he had no control and to which he must passively submit. And so it was in a neutral frame of mind that he sat down opposite her again under the sloping ceiling of her narrow room, chastising himself for his ridiculous initial surprise that, at this second meeting, she should be wearing different clothes.

  ‘When we met last week,’ she began, ‘I asked you to think about something for me.’

  ‘Oh!’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘No. I’m sorry. What was it you asked?’

  ‘We suggested that it wasn’t Daniel that you had wanted to forget, to put out of your mind.’ Amanda paused, waiting for his agreement. When Patrick nodded cautiously, she went on, ‘I asked you to think about what it might have been that you wanted to forget, what it was that you did block out.’

  Patrick’s mouth was dry, and he licked his lips. ‘I didn’t consciously block anything out,’ he said.

  ‘No. Not consciously. What were you feeling when you got into your car that morning?’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘Before that, then. Before you left the house.’

  ‘My parents always find partings difficult. Saying goodbye. Leaving. They get anxious.’

  ‘And how does that make you feel?’

  Patrick met her gaze, and knew that he had to make some effort to recover his feelings that morning. But so many similar occasions paraded across his memory – his school trunk, railway stations, airports, the decorative cast-iron railings that bordered Josette’s front garden where Maman’s taxi waited. He had done this so many times, coped so often with his parents’ guilt and anxiety, his grandmother’s blame and rejection, he was sick of it.

  ‘I upset people,’ he told her bitterly. ‘I make them angry and miserable.’

  Amanda’s eyes opened wide in surprise. ‘And how does that make you feel? To be responsible for upsetting people like that?’

  ‘Tired. Fed up. I want them to leave me alone.’

  ‘To get away from them?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And how do you do that?’

  He looked at her blankly. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  He shook his head, dismayed.

  ‘Do you think it might have anything to do with why you remember so little about the morning of the day when your son died?’

  ‘I assumed maybe that was shock or something. Posttraumatic stress.’

  ‘I’m sure it plays a part,’ Amanda agreed. ‘I imagine you have nightmares, too?’

  ‘No,’ he answered instantly. Amanda raised an eyebrow, but made no further comment.

  ‘I wonder if you can think of any other occasion when you weren’t able afterwards to remember some event, to account for some particular period of time?’ she went on. ‘Doesn’t matter how trivial.’

  Patrick thought hard. ‘I forgot
to go back to school once,’ he told her, surprised at how readily the long-ago memory had jumped into his mind. ‘My first year at public school. I’d gone to my English grandparents for half-term. I was supposed to go back on the Sunday afternoon, but went off on my bike instead and missed the train. Dad was there. He was furious.’

  ‘Where did you go off to?’

  ‘Oh, just some local wood, probably. It was twenty-odd years ago.’

  ‘Can you try to remember?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’ He met her gaze, smiling. ‘Really, I don’t.’

  ‘Were you punished?’

  ‘Hell, yes!’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Oh, the usual. I don’t know. Loss of pocket-money, something like that. Not being taken somewhere I wanted to go. Sanctions, Dad believed in, not beatings.’

  ‘What were your English grandparents like?’

  ‘Grandpa Hinde had lost an arm. Nearly perished being evacuated from Dunkirk. Grandma Hinde was in charge. They both died while I was at school, but I was quite fond of them, even though Dad was always kind of thorny around them. He claimed they always favoured his younger sister, the post-war baby, bonny and blithe. Not like him.’

  ‘Is that what your aunt’s like?’

  ‘She was good fun, yes. My cousins, too.’ Patrick’s recollections relieved some of his tension. ‘She used to come and take me out from school sometimes.’ Then his face clouded. ‘I ought to write to her. Doubt Dad will have told her anything.’