As I write this, your mother and I are making our final preparations to end our lives. I assume that this will be a shock to you, and hope that it will be. If so, it means that we will have achieved our intention.
This will be confusing for you, but I hope that by now you yourself might be a parent. If you are, you might understand why, for all of your lives, your mother and I have worried what would become of you both after she and I have died. As you might imagine, our main concern is about Roger. We know that you will always be able to take care of yourself, and your promise to take care of Roger has given us enormous comfort.
However, we know that this will be difficult even with help, and may be impossible without it. So our priority in recent years has been how to raise enough money to give you a head start financially. I am sorry to say that we haven’t had much success in being able to do that. I think you have noticed that in recent months my hands have begun to shake, and I have been diagnosed with an early onset of Parkinson’s disease. No one at the office has noticed it yet, but as soon as they do, I will need to give up work, which will set us in the wrong direction altogether.
So last month your mother had an idea. (I am only telling you that it was your mother’s idea so that you don’t think that she was ever under any pressure from me. She wasn’t, and isn’t.)
For many years we have had the usual life insurance, but six months ago I increased the policy and our premiums as far as we possibly could, without giving rise to undue suspicion. By now you will have worked out the rest of our plan. On some night in the near future, maybe even tomorrow, we are going to give this letter to Roger and ask him to hide it in the insect farm, and then to remain in the shed until morning. We are confident that we have prepared carefully enough for the fire to be considered an accident of some kind. We cannot afford to have it believed to be suicide, because then the insurance will not pay out.
I have made every effort to persuade your mother that her plan to provide you both with security could involve me alone, and she need not also lose her life. She would not hear of it. We have always done everything together, she reminded me, and we are going to do this together too. She said that she would have no interest in going on in this life without me, and to be honest I don’t think I have the courage to head off into the next one without her.
So, if things go according to plan, you should receive enough money in a lump sum to set you and Roger up – if not for life, then at least to give you a decent start. I apologize for the bad timing – you are in the middle of university – but with the increasingly obviously shaking hands, I just don’t think we can wait any longer. If I lose my job, I would also lose any death-in-service benefits that go with it. I know you will make the best of everything.
If our plan has worked, this will all be a distant memory for you. Your mother and I are sorry for the distress it will no doubt have caused you at the time, but we hope you understand why we have done it, and why we thought it best to keep it a secret from you. If ever our plan is discovered, we need to be certain that it never rebounds on you. This letter would be evidence of it. By the time you are reading this, no one will know or care.
So your mother and I thank you from the bottom of our hearts for whatever you have been able to do for Roger. If not much, we understand and forgive you. If you have been able to do what we know you intend, then God will bless you and will forgive you for anything bad you have ever done in your life.
Who knows, maybe one day we will be a family once again in heaven, whole and reunited.
As ever, Dad
My eyes were streaming with huge tears as I read the final few words, and I had to swallow hard to suppress the cry that was welling within me. I looked up and was glad to see that Roger was still staring into empty space, no doubt mentally down at the farm among his creations. I dried my face and tried to compose myself.
“It’s so great to receive that from Dad after so much time has passed, Roger. Brilliantly well done to you for saving it all these years.” Suddenly his face lit up with pleasure once again, but now I had a question which I had to ask, even though I already knew the answer. “Do you have any idea what is in this letter?” The expression on my older brother’s face changed again, and instantly he was more serious. He shook his head like someone being asked if they knew a particular party game. “That’s good, Roger,” I said. “Dad was just remembering what it was like to be fifty-seven and wanted to wish me a happy birthday. A lovely thought.”
Lame as it was, the explanation seemed to Roger to be perfectly satisfactory and, having kept the secret for so long, he seemed quite ready to get on with the day as though nothing special had happened.
My father’s handwritten words were echoing across the decades and around my brain, and I felt sharp surges of pain to think of the anguish which he and our mother had endured, and how desperate they must have been to feel that the best thing was to devise and carry out their plan. To be in a situation in which the best service you can perform for your children is to take your own lives must surely be as desperate as anything can get in this lifetime. It struck me that we often talk about people making “the ultimate sacrifice”, and that’s exactly what our parents had done for their son.
I guess that, once they decided on their course, it was impossible for my parents to go on living with it looming over their future. However, as so often in our lives, there were unanticipated consequences from the timing of their action. Their preoccupation must have been – understandably – the end of their own lives and the long-term financial security and welfare of their children. I also had little doubt that the prospect of advancing Parkinson’s disease must have been a terrifying one. They thought they were doing their best. From my point of view, of course, the timing could scarcely have been more unfortunate, and despite myself I felt a flash of anger that a decision which would have such a profound effect on the rest of my life had been taken by them alone and without my knowledge or consent. Their suicide had taken place while I was still at university, completely derailing my own plans, which had led directly to me having to live apart from Harriet. It was living apart from her which had thrown my wife into the arms of Brendan Harcourt, with all the dreadful and tragic consequences that had followed from that. I thought about how so much of what we do with one intention in our minds can so very easily turn into something completely unexpected and undesirable, and I wondered what my parents would have thought had they ever known what would be the aftermath of their personal self-sacrifice.
A little later on that morning, Roger asked me if I wanted to go down to the insect farm. His enthusiasm for his hobby had remained undiminished over the years, and quite often I would go down there with him. Some years ago I had commandeered a little area of unused ground just outside of the shed and turned it into something resembling a garden; nothing serious, just a few slightly sad-looking flowers and a little patch of shingle. Some friendly council workers digging up the road outside had looked the other way while I made off with half a dozen paving slabs on a wheelbarrow, and over the course of a couple of weeks, Roger and I had manhandled them into place to create our own little makeshift patio. We had a pair of folding canvas chairs which remained propped up against a wall inside the shed, to be pulled into use on any day when the sun broke through the clouds. On this day, my fifty-seventh birthday, there was a watery sun, and so I packed a make-do picnic of pies and salad, and made up a flask of tea. I could hear Roger pottering about inside the shed while I sat outside, enjoying the fresh air and reading the Observer.
After an hour or so I took my chair and went inside to see what Roger was up to, and found that he was kneeling on the floor and bending over one of his glass tanks, apparently motionless, and peering inside. For a few minutes I watched him, as unaware of me standing behind him as the insects in the tank were unaware of his looming presence above them. Funny how something so potentially powerful, so awesome in relation to yourself, can be just outside of your ability to pe
rceive it. These creatures owed their existence to Roger, and yet had no knowledge of him. They went about their business, eating, working, reproducing and occasionally massacring their enemies, without awareness or thought that they may be answerable to a greater being. Most often his presence was entirely benign and life-giving. Just occasionally however, if the situation demanded it, he would intervene, invisibly, and turn their lives upside down.
“So the police were wrong about you all along,” I said at last. Roger turned to look at me and raised his eyebrows. It was a facial expression suggesting a level of comprehension and enquiry which I do not think I had seen before, and it was this which made me continue. “For a long time, you know, I think they thought that maybe you had started the fire at Mum and Dad’s house.” The corners of his mouth drooped down slightly, and I kept on talking. “Someone had suggested to them that perhaps they had threatened to close down the insect farm, and that you had become angry and started the fire.” I don’t really know why I was saying it after all these years, but it seemed to me that if I did not do so now, I never would. I stopped speaking and allowed the words to percolate around the mystery that was Roger’s brain. Who could ever know if they were doing so in a way anyone else would recognize? It seemed entirely possible that at this moment he was considering what I had just said; equally it seemed just as likely that he was in a far off land of ants and beetles and spiders, or his mind could be in some third place that I might never know anything about.
“Yes,” he said finally, “wouldn’t it have been funny if I had got into trouble for the wrong one?”
Now it was my turn to raise my eyebrows.
“‘The wrong one’? What do you mean ‘the wrong one’?”
“Just saying, wouldn’t it be funny if I had got into trouble and had to go to prison for the wrong murder?”
My mind turned a somersault, but very quickly I recalled the confession he had made at the day centre all those years ago about killing the cockroaches which had come so close to getting him into huge trouble at the time. I was about to warn him that careless talk of that sort could be dangerous.
“Oh, I don’t think you’d go to jail for killing insects, Roger,” I said.
“Not for killing insects,” he said slowly, and looked directly at me. “For killing Harriet.”
Once, when I was a small child and my mother was hoovering the carpet on the stairs, I played a game which involved plugging and unplugging the vacuum cleaner from the electric socket. Evidently I must have found it amusing to confuse her about the reason why the machine kept stopping and starting. My game was interrupted by a huge bright blue-and-red flash of electricity which burned my hands and knocked me across the hallway, leaving every part of my body numb as it decided whether to live or whether to die. Eventually, gradually, it decided to live – but only just. I lost count of the number of adults who took the opportunity to share their view that I had had a miraculous escape. That, as near as I can describe it, was the effect on my mind and body of the three words just spoken by my brother.
Slowly, as the breath began to refill my lungs and the oxygen began to filter back into my bloodstream, I gently took Roger by the cuff of his jacket and led him outside. I picked up the two seats, clattering clumsily against the frame of the door as I unfolded and set them out. My foot caught the step and momentarily I stumbled, nearly falling headlong. My initial shock was even further exacerbated by the momentary jolt of tripping over. I put one chair to one side of the patio and one on the other, half-facing each other. I sat down and gestured for him to sit opposite me.
“Would you like some tea from the flask, Roger?” My throat was tight, and the words were uttered through a strangulated larynx. I rubbed my neck as though to loosen the sinews which had made it feel constricted. We sat down together while I poured the tea carefully into two enamel mugs, and for a few moments we remained silent, two old men, our lives inextricably intertwined by circumstances, and yet in so many ways there was such distance between us.
Over the next two hours, inch by inch, minute by minute, thought by thought, I slowly extracted from Roger the individual elements which, once rearranged, made up an account of the events of that night well over three decades earlier. It did not come out in the form of a story, nor any kind of narrative with one thing following another. It would not have been possible for Roger to relate it in such a way. Instead, he was able to give me a series of memories and impressions and images which made little sense in themselves but, when taken in the context of what I knew already and could remember myself, allowed me eventually to understand and piece together what had happened. His recall was not linear, and not logical, but what is so strange is that, when all put together, Roger remembered everything so much more clearly than did I.
Roger had understood, it turned out, that Harriet was due back from Newcastle on that Tuesday. Even that was a revelation to me. He had been excited at the prospect of seeing her and secretly had been disappointed when I arranged for him to spend the evening with Terry and his father. He had not known, or certainly had not understood, anything about the turmoil filling my mind regarding Brendan. Even now, as Roger’s vignettes of recollection were emerging, I was careful not to allow him to realize the impact on events of what he had told me about having seen Harriet and Brendan kissing, and having heard his words: “I love you, Harriet.”
Roger had worked out that I arranged for him to stay at Terry’s house because I wanted to be alone with Harriet, which is the reason he had not complained. But he had also been missing her himself, which was why he had started to become restless at Terry’s house, and had pestered Mr Harries to bring him home.
In fits and starts and with arbitrary and maddening diversions, Roger conveyed how he had told Mr Harries that it would be quite all right to drop him at the front door of the house. We seldom locked the door at the top of the stairs and Roger was quite capable of letting himself into the flat. He had not heard or thought anything untoward until he reached the top landing, at which point he had heard raised voices. Very gently and slowly, he had pushed open the door. Then he paused for a moment, stopping in his tracks, because he could hear a sound he had not heard for many many years. He had remained still and listened for a few minutes, unable to work out what the sound was. Only then had he realized that it was the sound of his younger brother crying.
The glimpses into his mind and thoughts that Roger allowed were enough for me to work out what had followed. The sound had set off in him an instinctive reaction, just as it had in the local streets many years earlier when I was being bullied by a bigger boy. Now, just as then, Roger had lost control. He had entered the room determined to intervene, only to be confronted by the sight of Harriet and me – her alongside me, apparently calm and in possession – but me sitting and sobbing and in a level of distress that he was not able to describe, and presumably therefore he was still less able to cope with. When he came to speak about this moment, his jaw seemed to seize up, and he struggled to form the words. His instinct to protect me from harm was overwhelming. He had picked up the first thing that came to hand, a wine bottle, and had done what he needed to do in order to take away the thing that seemed to be hurting me. When he turned back to me, it seems, I had passed out, and, seeing that I was no longer apparently suffering, he had left the room, washed, changed into his pyjamas and put himself to bed; which is how and why he was sleeping peacefully when I came to a little later and went into his room.
I will not attempt to convey the whirlwind of thoughts and impulses scrabbling over one another for priority and attention. “But when I woke up, Roger, I had a broken bottle in my hand.” Roger shook his head. He had no explanation.
“I could tell that she was hurting you. I just had to stop her from hurting you.”
Of course it is not possible for me to work out, let alone to express, what I felt and am still feeling. Is it anger? No. How could I feel angry that I had an older brother whose sole instinct was to save me f
rom distress? Relief? Hardly that: Harriet was still taken from me, still I never got her back and never came close to replacing the part she had played in my life. Bemusement? Probably that. I felt a sensation of profound emptiness, maybe better described as numbness, as I tried to unpick in my brain all of the ramifications and baggage which had resulted from the fact that for all these years, all these decades, I had thought myself to be responsible for the murder of Harriet Maguire.
If someone is a thief – steals something from his friend – but later returns it, is he still a thief? Or if he takes a single object without permission and then takes nothing else for forty years, is it still fair to describe him as a robber? Perhaps not. But once a murderer always a murderer. It is a label which, once attached, can never be detached. Though this dreadful secret has remained within the torment of my own memories, it has been the constant reality accompanying every aspect of my life. A fact of my life. Every moment of every day of every year, I have thought of myself as a killer; someone who has taken another person’s life. Perhaps we might compare it to having a missing limb: something you might eventually learn to live without, but still there will never be a moment of your life in which you do not have a missing part.
Though I could not place hand on heart and claim that Harriet’s murder has been present in every single thought, it would be fair to say that she, and what happened on that night, have been present somewhere in every conscious hour. Her physical beauty has not withered with the passing years, the tenderness of her touch has gently caressed me through sleep and dreams. But the other side of that same coin is the memory of throwing shovelfuls of soil onto her flawless skin, and of watching her disappear under the earth. All these images are every bit as vivid as I write as they were on the day it all happened. Now, as it turns out, the label which has adhered to me like a tattoo branded into my soul turns out to have been based on a falsehood. It was not I who ended the mortal life of my wife, but a man who – as Harriet herself was the first to acknowledge – would go to any lengths to protect me. He would, and he did.
The Insect Farm Page 28