‘Dad and now Neil.’ Martin shook his head.
Halfway through grunting in agreement, I stopped short. Dad and now Neil, he said. Why Dad and not Mum? Her situation was closer to Neil’s: the illness, the diagnosis, the decline.
‘Dad?’
He gave an odd twitch of his head and blinked, a sign of embarrassment.
‘Martin?’
He raised his hands then, palms towards me: leave it, forget it.
My mind scrambled for explanations. Men I’d lost as opposed to women?
‘Was Dad ill?’
He gave a great breath out. ‘Maybe now’s not the time.’
‘No,’ I was cross at his prevaricating, ‘now is the time – now is precisely the time. When better? I’ve nowhere else to be, nothing else to do. Dad – it was an accident.’ The clothes folded on the sand. I waited for him to agree, to explain, my face hot, my breath trapped in my chest.
His eyes, a lighter blue than mine, slid down, a slow blink of denial.
‘What then? Was he ill?’
Martin hesitated. I wanted to reach across the table and throttle him.
‘Not physically. Look, I don’t know all the details.’
‘You know a fuck of a lot more than I do.’ He flinched at the steel in my tone. ‘Martin, please, just tell me.’ I tried to rein in my agitation. There were prison officers up on the dais monitoring the room. Any argy-bargy and they would clear the place, send us all in.
‘He was depressed,’ Martin said.
Time ran slower. Disbelief clutched my throat; the hairs on my arms stood up; my scalp tightened. ‘What?’
Every image I had of my father threatened to dissolve with the onslaught of this new truth.
He was folding his clothes, slipping the watch from his wrist and tucking it into his shorts, laying the towel over the neat bundle. Shivering in the dawn wind, indifferent to the bone-deep ache as he waded out, driven by a greater pain.
The sea is cold around the British coast, even with the Gulf Stream, cold enough to induce hypothermia. Was that what he had done? Float? Memory jolted me rigid. Daddy supporting my back at the lido while I tried not to sink, my arms flung wide. Did he do that? A human star, limbs splayed as he bucked the waves, as the cold settled in his tissues and his teeth chattered and the sky rose and fell. Or did he hurry, diving down and filling his lungs with brine, searching for Charybdis to suck him under, snorting and choking and gulping in more?
‘Mum said it was an accident,’ I persisted.
‘Well, we can’t know for sure.’ Martin, who had always been so good and dull and ordinary. Who had toed the line and smiled politely as he did so. Who never seemed to have adolescence or any rebellious phase. Was this why? Had he carried this all those years? Not a cross to bear but a trim grey suitcase anchoring him to the known and safe?
‘Apart from the depression?’ I wanted evidence, facts and figures. Prove it.
‘He’d never done that before,’ Martin answered, ‘gone for a swim so early. He knew he’d be alone. He’d been drinking a lot, whisky with everything, sleeping it off in the afternoons.’
The taste of whisky, bitter in my throat. I stared at Martin, incredulous. Were we talking about the same holiday? I didn’t remember any of this.
‘They’d been rowing, arguing. Things were very rocky. Not just between them. Dad was in line for redundancy – Pendle’s was being taken over.’
The name brought back an image of a warehouse up a cobblestoned hill, near the edge of town. I don’t recall that we ever went inside but occasionally Dad would have to call in en route to some family outing. Pendle’s was a fancy-goods wholesaler. Now and then Dad would bring home some new item from their range (inflatable plastic photo frames, fibre-optic lights, luminous doorbell push), which we’d admire before they ever got into the shops.
‘But you can’t know for sure,’ I echoed his words. ‘Mum thought it was an accident and the police must have done.’ Even as I spoke a hot wash of anger flooded through me. He had left me on purpose. I’d always known my fierce independence, which I used to thwart my fear of abandonment, was rooted in his early death. But he had chosen to leave. Scylla, the sea-monster, had not robbed me of a father. My father had not loved me enough to stay. Was this how Sophie and Adam felt about Neil? Unfairly abandoned?
Martin cleared his throat. ‘When Mum was ill, I asked her.’
The air between us crackled with tension. I could feel my pulse in my ears and the burn of adrenalin about my neck and wrists.
‘She lied to the police?’ Obviously a family trait.
‘She didn’t tell them about the problems. They didn’t probe too deeply. Suicide back then, there wouldn’t have been any insurance.’ He fell quiet.
I kept my gaze steady. Suicide: illegal, shameful, dirty work at the crossroads. In Dante’s Hell, the suicides are imprisoned in trees, immobilized so they can hurt themselves no more. The Harpies roost in their boughs and rip off twigs making the trees bleed and the souls within moan.
She lied to me. ‘Why didn’t she tell me?’ I demanded.
Martin shrugged awkwardly. ‘You had Adam, you were expecting Sophie, you were travelling fifty miles every few days to visit.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I agreed with her. You’d such a lot on.’
Arguments crowded into my head, batting around like moths to a lamp. ‘Since then?’ I spoke sharply. ‘She’s been dead for fifteen years. Haven’t I a right to know what happened to him? He was my father too.’ There was jealousy clawing in my gut, the loneliness of having been left out. She’d told him but not me. And still the gnawing ache that he had left us, folded his clothes and left us for the dark, cold sea.
A look flew across Martin’s face, guilt, then his features fell. ‘I shouldn’t have said—’
‘Yes, you should – you should have said years ago.’ And I turned my face from him and wept.
Once I had learned from Martin that my father had committed suicide, I found it hard to stay afloat. I’d been punctured, my history, my childhood leaking away. My grief had doubled. I requested a doctor’s appointment; I’d been warned it might take ten days to actually see someone. While I waited to hear, I felt raw: a layer had been peeled back to expose my vulnerability. At night I’d go over and over it, vitriolic with anger at my father, raging at my family’s duplicity. Sleep eluded me – nothing new there – but the acidic fury I felt exacerbated the physical discomforts of sleeplessness. My muscles ached dully, I was dehydrated, my skin and eyes itchy, dizzy, and a headache lapped at the back of my skull.
By day I stuck to the timetable, kept my head down and struggled to cope with the tears that would spring to my eyes at the slightest thing. One afternoon Patsy, a woman I was teaching to read who also lived in my house, came in with a letter from her daughter. Would I read it to her and help her write back? It was mundane stuff, family news and local gossip, nothing overtly sentimental, but as I read on, I broke down. She rushed to comfort me, which made it even worse.
‘Aw, darlin’, what’s wrong? What’s to do?’
‘I lost my husband,’ I spluttered, ‘I miss him so much. And I lost my dad and now I feel as if I’m losing my mind.’
‘We all feel like that sometimes,’ she said. ‘That’s why there’s so many girls cutting up.’
Self-harm is commonplace. Some people cut or burn themselves; others swallow dangerous objects or even find ways of breaking their bones. The prison librarian told me that forty per cent of the women inside have a mental illness, and eighty per cent have a serious drug or drink addiction. Most have been convicted of crimes linked to their addiction. Counselling is practically non-existent – lack of resources. Women speak of waiting nine months, a year or more to see a therapist.
‘You want to see the doctor,’ she told me, ‘get some meds.’
I nodded, wiping my face. ‘I’ve put in for an appointment.’
And then I helped her write the letter.
If I had known that my father had killed himself, if I had experienced the bewilderment, the anger and hurt of that abandonment, would I have even entertained Neil’s request, knowing what it might feel like for his children?
Chapter Twenty-one
‘Deborah, will you please tell the jury what happened on the fifteenth of June 2009?’
‘The children went out, Sophie first to school, and then Adam.’
I had made a point of asking each of them if they had seen Neil before they left. One of the clues, perhaps, that had made Sophie doubt my story later that day.
‘I sat with Neil in our room until about one o’clock.’
Adam had gone by then. I felt sick. Sick and shaky and terribly frightened. It was the fear of nightmares, visceral and inescapable. Neil seemed calm, resigned to his decision. I wanted to savour our last hours and minutes together. It was a beautiful day, a good day to die. But my mind was fractured, panicky, skittering away from the deed that lay ahead. Would he want to eat? The notion of all these ‘lasts’ – a last meal, last kiss, last breath – was intolerable to me. I said very little. I lay beside him. Should I have made more of it? Brought in flowers and put music on? Songs to end a life to? I did none of these things because until the end I was hoping it would never happen.
‘And then what did you do?’
‘I got us a drink.’
Are you hungry? I had said. Perhaps if he ate a good lunch he would be sick and the whole thing would fall apart, a débâcle that would set him straight. Neil had shaken his head: I’d like a drink. Some wine.
I thought of his Greeks and his bloody Romans, drinking their flagons before falling on their swords. I smiled at him and went downstairs to cry. I’m sure he knew how distressed I was but he didn’t say anything when I returned except ‘Thank you.’ What was he thanking me for? The wine or the rest of it?
‘A drink?’ Mr Latimer wants the details.
‘Some wine.’
Red wine. The colour of blood. Ruby staining his lips, his tongue.
‘And then?’
‘It all happened so quickly,’ I say. Tears start in my eyes, but now I will say my piece. I’m damned if I’ll collapse again. ‘We hadn’t even finished the bottle and Neil said my name, he touched my face. And I knew what he meant.’
‘What was that?’
‘That it was time.’
‘Thank you. Please tell the jury what happened next.’
‘I got the morphine bottles and opened them.’
My hands were shaking and my heart hurt in my chest, a profound pain, as if a fist was squeezing it. I thought how fucking ironic it would be if I had a heart-attack before I could give him the drugs. End up dead and Neil forced to live on.
‘Neil drank one. I kissed him and told him I loved him. He told me the same.’ My voice is uneven, fluting with emotion. In the jury box Alice is crying silently, her hand over her mouth, her eyes closed and her wide face flushed.
‘Then I gave him the other bottle. Then I think he had some more wine. Then the last one from the breathing space kit, or it might have been then that he had the wine. I can’t be sure.’
‘How long did it take Neil to drink all the medicine?’
‘About five minutes.’ It was so quick.
‘And then?’
‘He fell asleep.’ His eyes closed, his hands relaxed, his breathing altered.
‘What time was this?’
‘It was almost two o’clock.’ I remember looking at the alarm clock and thinking that when it next rang Neil would be gone. That I’d be getting up on my own. It seemed unreal. Preposterous.
‘And what did you do then?’
‘I lay down with him. And waited.’
‘How long did you stay like that?’
‘Half an hour. Neil was still breathing. I didn’t know what to do. I knew Sophie would be home soon. I tried to wake him. To see if it was too late.’ As I talk, I can’t catch the rhythm of my own breath. There is no oxygen in it, I am choking. Pushing at Neil, shaking his shoulder, slapping his cheek. Neil, Neil, wake up. Please, oh, God, please.
Mr Latimer waits, hoping to settle me.
‘I couldn’t wake him up. I had the plastic bag.’ Sweat breaks out across my body. I am trembling. ‘I put the bag over his head. He jerked and made this sound, this awful sound. I held it tight. Then he stopped breathing.’
‘Would you describe what happened as a good death?’
‘No,’ I whisper.
It had been horrible. It hadn’t been dignified – not from my point of view. How could he have pressured me into it? The worst moments, the drumming of his heels on the bed, the strangled murmur that might have been ‘Stop’ or ‘Help’, the bubbling breath, the way his body bucked, the smell as he emptied his bowels. They pulse through me time and again in waves of shame and revulsion.
‘What did you do then?’
I cursed him. ‘I took the bag and the morphine bottles, along with the breathing space kit, put them in an old carrier bag in the wheelie-bin, then emptied the kitchen bin on top.’ My knees threatened to buckle as I went outside. I felt eyes on my back, expected someone to come up the drive any moment. Pauline to trot round with a complaint.
‘I went back upstairs. I needed to make sure he was still there. Still . . . dead.’
Flo, in the back row of the jury, blanches and looks down.
When I cupped his face in my hands I thought perhaps he was slightly cooler. I traced the lines on his brow with my thumbs, rubbed the heel of my hand against the stubble along his jaw. Speckles of silver in there with the black. He had never grown a beard, not even a moustache. He looked worried in death. His mouth turning down. His lovely eyes marbles now.
‘Wake up.’ I tested him. ‘Neil, come back.’ All I heard were the birds outside and the hammering from down the road where they were converting the loft. I wrapped one palm around his throat, over his Adam’s apple, absorbing the absence of motion, the lack of rhythm in his blood. I wanted to clean him up, bathe him with libations, oils and tears. Like the godly women who laid out the dead. We no longer had that skill: death, like birth, had been hived off to professionals, to antiseptic corporate enclaves far removed from the glory and filth of the real thing.
‘Then I rang the ambulance. And I left a message for Adam on his phone. And I rang Sophie,’ I tell the court.
‘What did you tell her?’
‘She guessed. When she got back I told her that I had gone upstairs and found he wasn’t breathing.’
‘When you and your husband planned his death, you hoped to evade detection?’
‘Yes.’
The Prof settles back. I sense disapproval. Dolly glances his way and behind them the Artist scratches at his neck, a leisurely move that seems foreign in the circumstances.
‘And did you discuss what you should do if any suspicions were aroused?’
‘Yes, if it came to it, I was to say that Neil had taken an overdose, that unknown to me he had hoarded his medication and that I had no idea what he was planning. And that I had then hidden the evidence to spare the children.’
‘But you didn’t do that, did you?’ Latimer asks.
‘No.’ Because once I knew Sophie was caught in the undertow with me, only the truth would do. ‘When I heard that Sophie had gone to the police, I just wanted to stop all the lies. To tell her the truth. Her and Adam. To help them understand. And also because I’d had to use the plastic bag, and they’d found evidence of that in the post-mortem, well, it made it less likely that Neil could have done it all himself.’
The bag was strong, clear plastic. It had once held some fabric samples in it – for some curtains in the Arts and Crafts style I was working on. I had gripped it tight under his chin. His breathing was shallow and the bag compressed in tiny, incremental stages until it lay plastered and creased against his forehead and cheeks, sucking against his nostrils. His face darkening and then those dreadful pitiful movements he made. The bri
ef clamour for life that had me leaping out of my skin. The appalling stillness that followed.
‘Why didn’t you tell Sophie the truth?’
‘I wanted to protect her, and Adam. I didn’t want them to know what we had done. Neil wanted them to believe he had died naturally from his illness.’
‘And why didn’t you tell the police what you had done when you were questioned?’
‘The same reason. Because of the children. Because I had broken the law and Neil was dead and I had to be there for our children.’
‘What do you think now about your actions?’
‘I never should have done it. It was awful, the whole thing. If I’d only been stronger and kept refusing him.’
‘Why didn’t you?’ Mr Latimer sounds almost harsh now.
‘I couldn’t think straight. I couldn’t work out what was best. And Neil was so clear, so sure. I was absolutely exhausted and losing my mind and he kept on at me until I couldn’t say no any longer.’
‘How do you feel now about agreeing to his request?’
‘Terrible.’
I look across to Sophie, willing her to face me but her head is bowed, her hair a veil.
I wrote to Sophie from Styal. Ms Gleason cautioned me that I ran the risk of being accused of exercising undue influence on a prosecution witness but I promised that there would be nothing inflammatory in my letter. The prison monitored communication anyway. I wrote to say how sorry I was. To tell her how much I loved her and how I never meant to hurt anyone with my actions. And that, whatever happened, I would never stop loving her. I told her that Neil loved her too. Also I promised that if she ever wanted to ask me about Neil, about his life or his death, whatever she needed to know I would tell her. There was one thing I didn’t write that needled at me like a toothache. I left it out because it might have seemed too harsh and because this wasn’t the place to pose that question, because she was my daughter and only fifteen. What would you have done? That was what I really wanted to know. If it had been you, and you loved him as I did, then what would you have done?
The Kindest Thing Page 19