by Aileen Izett
“I would have shown you but you were so fucking rude.”
“It’s not true.” She was pleading with me.
“Tom thinks so little of you that he thought you’d just lie and say it was your brother’s anyway and do you know what? I think he’s right. You’d use anyone and anything…”
“Burnt. Why?” She sank into the nearest chair. She put her hands over her ears to shut me out.
“Leave me alone,” she whispered.
I left the kitchen, still enraged but calm.
Harry and Serena were chatting by their car.
“She’ll be along in a second,” I said, after saying my goodbyes. I went back into the château, through the front door. I watched from a salon window as Eveline emerged, without a backward glance at the house. She exchanged a few words with Harry and Serena. Whatever she said, it seemed to cause a flurry of consternation but eventually, they settled themselves in the car. Serena reversed, and started to drive down the avenue. Harry caught sight of me and gave me a thumbs-up from the back. Serena thrust her arm out for a valedictory wave. Not Eveline, who was staring straight ahead.
A drop of rain landed on the window pane. Then another and another. The sky was the colour of concrete, pressing in on the château. I went to find my brother.
Chapter 54
Tom wasn’t in the gym. I opened all the windows and let the grey air with a few flecks of rain roll in. Outside, it was very still with a two-dimensional quality: the trees stiff like cardboard cut-outs on a painted landscape.
Tom was no longer bothering to hide the newspapers — the pile was on the floor, not too far from the mattress. The bottom sheet was half off the mattress, displaying stained ticking which made my stomach turn even though I knew that the stains had been there long before Greg had slept on it. I sat on the mattress and flicked through the papers, so taut that I couldn’t concentrate enough to read.
The noise of the plumbing trying to belch out hot water eventually subsided and in the silence, I listened for Tom’s footsteps to come down the corridor. I listened as they came nearer and nearer before coming to an abrupt halt. I caught the look of apprehension which flitted across Tom’s face but I knew he wasn’t surprised to find me waiting. I held up the alarm clock for him to see.
“I broke this yesterday.”
“Sis…” He started.
“How could you? She’s a child.”
He walked across to the exercise bike.
“She’s twenty-two. She can look after herself.” He turned his back to pull on a pair of underpants. “I heard you having another nightmare last night. Everything okay?”
“We owed her a duty of care,” I kept my voice level.
“That’s bollocks. She’s better able to look after herself than you are. How do you think she has survived so far?”
He reached for the pair of shorts dangling on the bike’s handlebars, and pulled them on. “You forget she’s the pampered darling of a discredited régime.”
“You’re unbelievable.”
“Look, if it makes you feel any better, nothing happened, I promise.”
“Tell me another.”
“A girl looking for her long-lost brother.”
A drop of rain smacked against a window pane, followed by another and then another. They cascaded down the glass, in front of an unrelentingly grey sky.
I watched Tom thread a belt through the loops on his waistband. He studiously ignored me, until eventually he said:
“Look, I’d never hurt her — anymore than I would you.”
“Why did you have to climb into bed with her?”
“Hang on a minute,” he said. “It was the other way round. She came to me.”
For one long bewildering moment, it was as if he had stabbed me through the heart. I’d thought he had cajoled her.
“You’re a two-bit opportunist, apart from anything else.”
“Do me a favour.”
“It’s the truth, Tom.”
“You’re jealous. You should have seen the way you looked at her sometimes.”
“You don’t care whose life you fuck up.”
“If you say so.” His dismissiveness hurt. How dared he?
“You fucked up mine big time.”
He laughed. “I don’t think you need help on that front.”
“Not many people kill their Dad.”
Tom’s laughter died in his throat. He looked at me, aghast.
*
No longer was it Eveline between us. It was the long shadow of what had happened thirty-six years ago on a gloriously sunny afternoon in Devon. The picnic — my special picnic as promised by my father — was laid out in the shade of an enormous oak tree. Tired of waiting for our mother who had gone down to the stream to retrieve the cooling bottles of pop, I had wandered into the sun. It was so hot, I remember, that the sun painted stripes on my back through the thin cotton of my dress. There wasn’t a breath of wind. My father was stretched out on the rug, lazily swatting flies away from the food. He was a very handsome man, our father: chiselled jaw, dark lock of hair flopping onto his forehead. Tom was above him, leaves rustling, climbing to the top of the tree.
Our father called up to Tom, remonstrating. “You’ll break a leg you silly monkey!” Tom swung higher and higher.
Sighing, our father stood up, feet carefully positioned between the plates of food. He cupped his hands around his mouth. “Come down! Now!”
Tom flung himself from branch to branch. “Look Dad! Look at me!”
I heard cracking. I saw a flash of blue and green t-shirt plummeting. I saw my father with his arms outstretched. One shout. I saw my brother knock my father off his feet. In the silence which followed the sun would never be in the same place in the sky again.
Tom stood up shakily, up off our father’s head. He started to cry. I screamed.
Our father lay spread-eagled across our picnic. His eyes were wide and staring. There were leaves everywhere. An arm had squashed all the scotch eggs. A foot had ruined the chocolate sponge cake he and I had made that morning.
Our mother rushed past me. She knelt beside her man. “Darling. Darling.” She leant her face into his. She ripped open his shirt collar. She pressed two fingers against his neck. She pulled Tom towards her. “What happened? Tell me what happened.” She looked to me but I couldn’t speak.
She flung her arms around Tom. She rocked him backwards and forwards, tears cascading down her cheeks. “My poor baby. Poor, poor baby.” She scrambled to her feet. She looked up into the huge canopy above us.
And in that room, that improvisation of a gym in the château, our mother’s terrible cry of loss reverberated down the years.
*
Forwards and backwards Tom paced, between the bike and the treadmill, the tracks of his feet in the dust. He didn’t hit me, of course he didn’t. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking, because he kept his face averted.
I wanted him to burrow under the covers with me again. I wanted to hold him, hug him. I wanted to say how sorry I was. The sunlight had completely gone from the room. I wanted the easy intimacy we used to have — so long ago. Such a long time ago.
A drop of rain smacked against a window pane, followed by another and then another. They trickled down the glass, in front of an unrelentingly grey sky.
Tom stood in front of me. I looked at his feet, the bare vulnerable toes with the tufts of hair.
“Dad had a heart attack when I fell out of the tree. He had a weak heart. Don’t you remember Mum telling us?”
I shook my head, unable to speak.
Tom crouched down. He took my hands. His one brown eye and his one green eye — they weren’t angry any longer. They were full of pity.
“When she came back from the hospital, she sat us down, each on a knee and told us that it wasn’t our fault, that we shouldn’t blame ourselves… you can’t remember?”
“It was my picnic.” I could see the little girl, I could feel her fear — and then she wa
s blanked, whitewashed, scrubbed out by my brain.
“She never spoke of how he died again, as far as I know. She blamed herself. If it hadn’t been for her, they would never have gone down to Devon.”
*
I remembered being woken up by my father. I remembered being tenderly cajoled into putting sleepy arms into sleeves, sleepy legs into trousers, sleepy feet into shoes. I remembered sitting in the back of the car, Tom asleep beside me, looking at the backs of my parents’ heads. I remembered speeding out of the city in the grey dawn light.
*
“She had had an affair,” Tom said. “Dad had found out and insisted that they leave London.”
“It wasn’t a proper holiday.”
“Somehow,” Tom said, “Even as little children, I think you and I knew that.”
How much our father must have loved our mother. Sometimes, I’d take the cup of tea up to her in the morning, when he was busy making our breakfast. Carefully, I’d ascend the stairs, trying to stop the tea slopping against the china rim. I’d offer it, wobbling in its saucer, to my mother who looked delicious propped up in bed. She would reward me with a kiss and ask me to ‘tell Daddy that Mummy loves him very much’.
Tom rubbed my hands between his. “You are cold, aren’t you?”
He sat on the mattress beside me. Together we watched the rain cascade down the windows. It was like a curtain on the world, shutting it out.
“Poor Sis,” he said, “you’ve lived with such a burden.”
*
I can still see the bulk of my father sitting at the gate-legged table in Devon, hunched over his typewriter. I can see the slender shape of my mother with her arms draped over his shoulders, dropping kisses onto the top of his head. I can’t hear the clackety-clack of the machine, the constant refrain of my childhood, so suddenly truncated.
*
“That’s why,” Tom’s voice was muffled because he’d buried his face in his hands. “Mum found me so difficult. I reminded her of her guilt, me being the one who caused his death. If she hadn’t had an affair, if we hadn’t gone down to Devon, Dad might have stayed alive.”
“She said that to you?”
“No, of course not.” Tom wept, tears trickling through his fingers. I wanted to weep too, for him. I didn’t. I was too angry with the pretty, fey, young woman who was our mother.
“I tried so hard,” Tom whispered, longing in his face. “To make it up somehow.”
“She found you difficult,” I told him, “because you were a little boy who had lost his father. Nothing and no one could ever make that up to you.”
“So she didn’t hate me?”
“No,” I told him. “She loved you. She loved us. She just wasn’t much of a mother, being crippled by guilt and grief.”
The truth, finally. Our father would have died young, regardless.
Other than the piles of paper and the typewriter, our father’s writing table was clear, Spartan in its simplicity but in order to get to the table, you had to wade through sheaves of white paper, crumpled into balls which no one was allowed to clear in case my father had written a nugget of pure gold on the rejected page. By the time of his death, the balls of white paper were like a lake, held back from spilling into the hall by the dining room door.
*
There was an exasperated shout from below. “Anyone at home?”
Tom dashed to the window. “What the hell does she want?”
Chapter 55
Valerie’s cheeks were flushed. She could barely contain her excitement. She addressed Tom. “There are a lot of questions being asked in the village about you.”
Tom didn’t bother to conceal his distaste. “That doesn’t surprise me.”
Valerie cocked her head. She looked like a hen: sharp-nosed and sharp-eyed. “I heard about the restaurant. By all accounts it was a set-up. That man and the journalist travelled down together.”
“I can’t believe you’ve come all the way up here to tell us some village gossip?”
I didn’t understand his open hostility.
Valerie gave one of her tinkling laughs, turning her back on Tom. She opened her hand for me to see a silver bullet, gleaming in the dim, sodden light. “I’m giving this to Eveline. It’s hers by right.”
She was very surprised when I told her that Eveline had gone and was on her way to Paris.
“But I thought I saw…” Valerie shook her head. “Maybe I’m seeing things. Never mind. Take it anyway. You’re more likely to see her again than me.”
Tom marched her to the front door. This time though, there was no solicitous hand guiding her and definitely no kisses on the cheek.
“She blackmailed me,” he said, as he pushed the door closed. “You know the time I went in with her and left you and Greg in the car? Then. She cleaned me out of the rest of my cash. She’d dug up some tripe on the internet. Threatened to contact Sam. I can’t have my wife and kids involved.”
I told Tom about meeting Colin Wareing on the hill.
“This can’t go on,” was all he said.
Once I’d mentioned the journalist’s name, the feeling of being under siege — of helplessly waiting for him — wasn’t helped by the weather. Visibility from the windows was almost nil. A mist of rain rose from the ground and pressed against the windowpanes.
Tom occupied himself by making a roaring fire in the huge fireplace in the hall. He stood in front of it, watching Greg’s logs hiss, spit and throw tawny flames into the cavernous chimney. He told me that he was going to tell Colin Wareing the truth. “I can’t keep on running forever and there are mitigating circumstances.”
I put my arms around his waist and tried to squeeze all my love and sympathy for him into that hug. He smelt of wood smoke. It was a smell which brought back my father.
He leant his head on my shoulder. “At least, they won’t be able to touch the château.”
“Come down to the kitchen,” I said. “We need to eat.” Neither of us had had breakfast.
In the kitchen I made a lunch of salad leaves with a tin of tuna. I sliced the baguette which I had bought only that morning, but which seemed a lifetime ago. Tom went down to the cellar and reappeared with a bottle of white wine. He wrenched out the cork. I laid the table with two knives, two forks and two plates — my favourites, white with a burgundy border patterned by lacy gold.
“One more thing,” Tom said. “I didn’t sleep with Eveline, I promise.”
“I am so sorry. I was just so angry…”
“What if Claudine was correct? That her brother did die a horrific death here?”
I looked at him, stunned. “So you did believe her? Despite everything you’ve…”
He interrupted me. “It doesn’t matter what you and I think, it’s what Eveline believes — and I couldn’t have her believing that. It would have been too much for the girl. For anyone.”
“In a way, I was trying to bury him for her here. To stop her futile searching. Whatever happened to that young man can’t have been good, don’t you see?”
All along he had been trying to protect Eveline and I’d betrayed him just as she was leaving. I had done him — and her — a grave injustice.
“That’s why you got rid of the passport.”
“Yes,” he said.
I remember hoping, reasoning that there was no possibility of him ever finding out that the sister he trusted had proved so unworthy in a fit of spite. I have no way of knowing what I might have said because just then, the door to the archway, which had been shut tight on account of the weather, crashed open, hitting the wall.
Startled, Tom and I jumped up from our chairs. Eveline, scarcely recognisable, hung from the door, chest heaving, her eyes locked on Tom. What was shocking was her face. That beautiful face was ugly, truly ugly, with hate. She panted, gulping in air, her eyes never leaving Tom.
I didn’t dare go to her. I didn’t dare speak. I couldn’t. I remember the silence punctuated by her heavy, rasping breathing.
It was as if I wasn’t there. That I didn’t exist. Only Tom existed for Eveline.
Tom didn’t move, didn’t utter a word. A deep flush flooded over his cheeks. He knew.
Eveline used the sleeve of her sodden, blood-splattered jacket to wipe away the rivulets of water running down her face. A puddle was quickly forming around her shoes.
“Let me get you a towel,” I said gently, taking a step towards the kitchen stairs.
“Sit down.” Her voice was like a lash.
“I want you,” she said, speaking to me, but with her unwavering gaze still fastened on Tom, “as a witness.”
I sat down at what used to be Eveline’s place at the table.
Tom didn’t move at all. It was as if he was caught in a spell which rendered him immobile.
Eveline walked over to Tom. My brother’s face took on a wary, hunted look. His eyes looked anywhere but at her as she came so close that her little breasts left a smear of mud on his shirt.
“Your sister,” she said. “told me this morning that you had burnt Zachary’s passport.”
Slowly, Tom’s eyes turned in my direction. His sense of shock — of betrayal — was unbearable. I stood up.
“He was only thinking of you,” I said to Eveline, “you’ve got to understand…” She didn’t allow me to finish, shoving me back into the chair with such force that the chair toppled backwards with me following it to the floor. I remember lying there stunned, looking up into the innards of the table.
Tom moved then. I saw his hand reach out. I saw her feet in the wet trainers take a couple of steps across the flagstones. A sound reverberated around the kitchen like a gunshot. She had slapped him on the face.
Shakily, I hauled myself onto my feet. Tom was bent, holding onto the table for support. He was as white as a ghost, the full force of her blow reddening one cheek. She stood beside him, her hands clenching and unclenching. I thought she was going to punch him. He collapsed into a chair. He hid his face in his hands while she looked down on him, scorn written all over her face.
It wasn’t just my legs trembling. I was juddering with shock. I righted the chair. I, too, sat down. Eveline stood behind Tom, one hand pressing down on his shoulder. She yanked his hair to force him to sit upright. His eyes started with fright.