‘Gina—’
‘Yes?’
‘I thought we needed – perhaps – to talk?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I meant it when I said I was sorry I couldn’t help when you wrote to me.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Obviously you’ve managed very well in spite of it,’ he conceded. ‘But I have thought about you a great deal.’
She didn’t speak, but looked down at her cup, tucking the pale fronds of hair back behind her ears. Her cheeks coloured again. David was moved. He was so close now to the truth.
He said: ‘I have seen you, as well.’
She was silent.
‘It was you, wasn’t it? Outside my house? Following me in the car? Gina …?’
She murmured something that he couldn’t hear.
‘What did you want?’ he asked. ‘Was there something you wanted to say?’
Now she shook her head. Whispered: ‘No.’
He was beginning to feel more confident. ‘Then perhaps I could say something.’
Another whisper, which he didn’t catch, accompanied by a quick, nervous glance towards the door.
‘Don’t worry Gina,’ he said, ‘I’m not about to say or do anything you wouldn’t want your mother to hear. Quite the opposite.’ He waited but she’d dropped her head again. Something about this shy, penitential attitude convinced him that he’d done the right thing in coming here. She was very young, and confused. If she felt guilty about anything, she needed to be relieved of that guilt. If she needed his help and attention, she should have it.
He leaned forward. ‘I want you to know – it’s important to me – that I wasn’t happy about letting you go after your trial period at the office. I think we worked together well. We understood each other. We could have made a good team. The whole episode was a very distressing one as far as I was concerned.’
She looked up now and he was surprised by how levelly her eyes met his. ‘Was it? Was it really?’
‘Yes.’
‘But you had your new baby and everything.’
‘Yes. That’s true. Maybe that’s why I didn’t fight my corner strongly enough on your behalf. At any rate since then you’ve been in my thoughts a great deal – almost all the time – and I want you to know that if there’s anything—’
At this point the front door slammed shut, and the dining room door flew open almost simultaneously, and with such force that the inside door crashed against the wall and bounced back. The man who entered stopped it with the palm of his hand. The effect was of a series of reports, like gunfire. David flinched with shock. Gina let out a little whimper and seemed to shrink in her chair.
‘You,’ said the man, pointing at David. ‘On your feet.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I said—’ the man took one stride, grabbed David by the arm and hauled him out of his seat – ‘up.’
‘Gina …?’
At the same moment that he spoke to her, a voice from the hall said. ‘Gina, you all right in there?’ and Mrs King came into the room. She went and stood next to her daughter, giving David a look of utter disgust. The man released his arm with a shaking motion, as if ridding himself of something sticky, vile. Worse than the violence was the loathing and contempt in the man’s eyes.
‘I’m sorry,’ said David. ‘ Who are you?’
‘This is my husband,’ said Mrs King.
‘Gina’s father,’ said the man in a mocking, bullying voice. ‘You better believe it.’ He turned to Gina. ‘Is this him then?’
‘It is,’ said Mrs King. ‘I told you it was, on the phone—’
‘Is this him?’ asked Mr King again, still looking at his daughter, but this time stabbing a finger in David’s direction.
Gina nodded. ‘ Yes.…’
David was panic-stricken. It was like the worst sort of nightmare, a situation both terrifyingly dangerous and utterly incomprehensible, and over which he had no control whatever.
‘Please,’ he said. ‘ What am I supposed to have done?’
The man turned back to him, slowly, with an expression of sneering disbelief. ‘Don’t push your luck. The only reason I haven’t called the police is because I don’t want my daughter put through any more.’
‘Any more – I’m sorry? Gina?’
She burst into noisy sobs. Her mother mouthed the word ‘Bastard!’ as if it were too foul for her daughter to hear.
The sobs, an expression of real feeling, made him foolhardy. ‘Gina, tell me what it is I’m supposed to have done wrong—’
His arm was grabbed again, this time so hard that the fingers bit into him like steel teeth.
‘Shut – the fuck – up!’
A small hopeful possibility occurred to him. ‘Why don’t you call the police? Then at least I can make a statement, we can all be clear, keep our tempers – there’s been a misunderstanding—’
‘No there hasn’t!’ Gina stood up, her chair crashing to the floor behind her. Her face was reddened and swollen with emotion but not, he noticed, wet with tears. ‘You dirty liar! You know you’ve been spying on me! You got me dismissed and then you’ve been watching me, you found out where I lived—’
‘Gina, you told me, it was on your letter—’
‘No I did not! You found out and you came over here. I’ve seen you before, but the other afternoon you knew I’d seen you. You did! That’s why you came back! And you’ve been coming on to me – he has!’ She enjoined her parents. Mr King jerked his arm painfully. ‘He’s been sitting here saying how he’s always fancied me, it’s pathetic, I hate him, he got me the sack because I was on to him!’
‘You frigging low-life,’ said Mr King conversationally. ‘I ought to give you a good slapping only I don’t want to dirty my hands.’
‘I hate him!’ screamed Gina. ‘ I hate him, he’s disgusting! I hate him.’
‘Hear that?’ asked King into David’s ear as the tempest raged. ‘If not, listen up: she hates you. You disgust her. She’s not the only one.’
David may have said something, he had no idea what. All reality seemed suspended. The mother, too, was now screaming in a kind of parody of hysteria that would have been laughable if it hadn’t been so terrifying. What was she doing? How could people behave like this?
‘Come on – out!’
He was manhandled into the hall, and slammed up against a wall. The breath flew out of him and a muffled explosion of pain went off in the back of his head. So this, he thought wildly, is what it’s like. You’ve seen it in films, but this is what it feels like – never forget. But that was nothing to what followed. King was pressed up against him, like the assailant in some bizarre sexual encounter, but now he had him by the balls, clutching and squeezing. David howled, then retched, and King released him abruptly, again with that shaking, throwing away action, which resulted in another excruciating stab of pain. Bile flooded his mouth. King opened the front door, returned, dragged him forward and pushed him out.
‘Get out of my house you stinking creep, before you make a mess on my carpet. And if you get inside mailing distance of my daughter again your life won’t be worth living!’
It would have been a small mercy, David remembered thinking, if King had followed this speech by slamming the door as he had on the way in. Instead, he held it wide, and stood watching him as he struggled to stand in the bright wedge of light, weaving and tottering with pain. Though he was unaware of any other spectators, he knew there must have been, and that for the first and only time in his adult life he was being deliberately exposed to public humiliation.
He made it to the car and leaned for a moment on the roof, his lungs heaving. His head felt as though someone were beating on the back of it with a hammer, and the contents of his stomach pressed somewhere just behind his throat, ready at any moment to burst out and add to his shame. When he’d summoned the strength to unlock the door and get in he saw that King was still staring. Only when he’d started the engine
and begun to turn the car did the door of the house close.
It was a long and painful pilgrimage getting home. He did it in fits and starts, the frequent breaks necessitated by the need get out and gulp fresh air and fight back nausea. To weep would have been a comfort, but no tears came.
At one point on the ringroad he passed a police car parked in a layby, two bored officers in the front with nothing better to do than pick on motorists. The awful idea occurred to him that his slowness might cause suspicion and he be breathalysed, and he crept cautiously up to forty. For a moment at the Kings’ house he’d have welcomed the police with open arms, as symbols not just of authority but of order: now the thought of being questioned about his condition filled him with dread. But they took no notice and when he was well past he slowed down again, to the annoyance of the haulage truck behind him.
The longed-for haven of home, when he reached it, presented a new set of problems. It was only six-thirty, but Annet must have got home early, the Toyota was parked in the drive. He switched off the engine and peered at himself in the driver’s mirror. His head and his crotch throbbed. His face, though sickly, was unmarked, but his suit was muddy, and there was – he could scarcely believe it – a tear in the leg of his trousers where he’d crashed down on the Kings’ front path. Between the jagged edges of the tear was a gleam of blood.
There was no escaping the need, yet again, to lie.
‘No panic,’ he said, filling the seconds of Annet’s horrified reaction. ‘A couple of lads duffed me up in the car park.’
It was impossible to tell whether she believed him or not. Untypically, she didn’t ask a single question, so he provided the information anyway, putting the story on record. Keep it simple, he thought.
‘They were about to break into the car. When I shouted at them they rushed over and did this on their way past. Just a couple of kids really, but quite big. I was scared half to death … The whole thing only took seconds, there’s no way I could identify them.’
He said all this as Annet helped him undress. Silently, without looking at his face, she unbuttoned his shirt, moved round him to ease off his sleeves, knelt to unlace his shoes and slip his trousers over his feet … Freya, in her nightsuit, lay propped on the pillows on their bed, watching.
‘They pushed me,’ he continued doggedly. ‘I came a hell of a cropper on the back of my head, and one of them kicked me in the crotch for good measure.’
She made only two comments. The first was to say. ‘You should have gone to A and E you know.’
To which he answered, truthfully: ‘I only wanted to get home.’
The second came as she noticed the bruises on his arm.
‘They didn’t like you, did they?’
‘No,’ he said, ‘they did not.’
She put witch hazel on the bruises and bathed his cut knee with disinfectant, but held up her hands, literally, at the angrily swollen condition of his balls. She found some proprietary painkillers in the medicine cabinet and he swallowed a couple with a cup of sugary tea while she put Freya to bed. By the time she came back he was barely conscious, exhausted by fear, pain and tension, and muzzy from the pills.
She sat down on the edge of the bed next to him.
‘I think you should report this.’
‘Pointless.…’
‘If everyone took that view these little thugs would never get their comeuppance.’
‘I told you I wouldn’t recognise them anyway.…’
‘OK.’ She gave his hand a brief squeeze and stood up. ‘I’ll let you kip. Light on or off?’
‘Off … thanks.…’
She switched it off and went to the door.
‘At least,’ she said, ‘you’re back.’
Chapter Seventeen
The next morning, after a wretched and largely sleepless night David felt as if he’d been put through a mangle. Specific injuries were lost in the miasma of pain, which the pills (repeated twice during the night) succeeded in distancing but not dispelling. Preferring full consciousness, he decided against taking any more: he wanted to maintain a hold on the sequence and detail of his story.
Annet saw to Freya, and brought him a cup of tea. When he heard her talking to Lara in the hall he struggled with agonising slowness out of bed, drew on his dressing gown as though it were barbed wire, and hobbled down the stairs.
Annet watched his progress with the same thoughtful expression she’d worn last night. Lara, holding Freya, was more expansive.
‘Hell’s bells!’ she yelped. ‘ It’s the dawn of the living dead!’
‘Good morning.’
‘Little bastards, they need a taste of their own medicine.’
‘Yes,’ he murmured, pleased at least that his story had gone into circulation. ‘But I wasn’t the man to give it to them.’
Annet met him at the foot of the stairs, gave him a peck on the cheek. ‘You know my view, you should report it anyway.’
‘We’ll see.’
‘And if you feel at all dizzy, or have any trouble with your vision – anything like that – you must call the doctor. Or ask Lara to take you to Emergency.’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Lara, ‘I’ll have him in hozzy so fast his feet won’t touch the ground.’
There was the merest suggestion of the cowboy look as Annet said: ‘Good.’
When she’d gone, Lara was firm. ‘OK Dad, you’ve proved you’re tough, why not go straight back to bed? I won’t tell anyone.’
‘I haven’t even called the office yet.’
‘Let me do that while you crash out.’
He was sorely tempted but decided, on mind-over-matter grounds, to try and remain downstairs for at least the morning. Upstairs in bed there’d be nothing between him and the awful images of yesterday.
He lay on the sofa and attempted to read the newspaper, but the print jiggled before his eyes like a swarm of black insects. Lara took Freya upstairs, leaving him in peace – he could her her pottering about up there, singing, talking to the baby. At nine-thirty he got up – an exercise which made his eyes water – limped across the hall to the study, and rang Jackie.
She was horrified. ‘That’s terrible! Have you reported it? You should, you know. And don’t even think of coming in tomorrow either, you must be in shock!’
It was the first time he’d heard her sound even remotely put off her stroke, and he was touched that it should be on his behalf.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘I shall be fine tomorrow.’
This was open to doubt. The pain, of course, would diminish. But the pain was a distraction. Even now, while he was still struggling with it, the memory of what had happened kept erupting, turning him weak and clammy with shock. The smells returned – the cooking, Gina’s scent, the stale smoke on King’s jacket … And the sounds – her voice, harsh and coarse, screaming ‘ I hate you!’ … her mother’s vulgar wailing … the sickening bang of his head against the wall … Worst of all was the endless, inescapable recreation of his humiliation on the front path … It still seemed too awful, too alien, to have happened.
At ten-thirty, with Freya taking a nap, Lara brought him some coffee.
‘I put sugar in,’ she told him, covering his groan as he sat up.
‘Thanks.’ He tried to focus on matters other than himself. ‘ Has there been any news of your grandmother?’
‘Dad called last night – early morning their time. He said she was peaceful. I suppose that means she’s going to die.’
He was shocked by her bluntness. ‘Not necessarily. How’s her physical condition, did he say?’
‘No worse, but no better either.’
‘She’s making her mind up,’ suggested David.
Lara seemed to like this. ‘That’d be right. She’s a contrary old bird, it’d be just like her to keep us all guessing. If I was there I’d put a squib up her backside I can tell you.’
‘Send her a telepathic squib. You’re forceful enough.’
She laughed, and
he felt rewarded. ‘ Right!’
Half an hour later, after checking with him, she took Freya out in the car to do some shopping. The house settled round David, solid and warm as a sleeping body. He still hurt all over, but for the first time in nearly twenty-four hours he began to relax, to contemplate the possibility of sleep. He felt as if he were dropping through the net of pain, feeling its rough touch as he went but gradually, steadily, sinking into some quiet, dark place beneath it.
It was when he was on the very brink of sleep, separated from its blissful oblivion by a single tenuous thread of consciousness, that he saw her.
There was nothing vague or amorphous about her presence. She stood near the window, looking over and beyond him in the direction of the drawing-room door, as if anticipating the arrival of a friend. She wore something plain and dark, but he couldn’t have described it because his attention was entirely drawn to her face. It was a face handsome rather than beautiful – strong, intense, androgynous – with pale hair, it might have been fair or grey, swept straight back from the forehead.
David knew without a shadow of a doubt that this was the face that had stared back at him from the upstairs window that day. And also that he recognised it: it was familiar to him in some visceral way, the way – and the analogy sprang easily to mind – his newborn daughter’s face had been familiar; as if somewhere beneath the surface that was hers alone her genetic inheritance lay like a reflection beneath ripples. And now he lay still and relaxed as a newborn infant himself, and perfectly, blessedly, pain-free. There was the sense he remembered of the air around him being a caul, enclosing and protecting him. He was certain that the woman knew he was there and might even be watching over him in some way.
This entire experience, complete and vivid as it was, could not have lasted more than seconds. The last thing he saw as he plunged into sleep was the hauntingly familiar face, still gazing over and beyond him with Red Indian-like calm. And just after his eyelids closed the faintest trace of some sweet, evocative scent.…
He woke, disorientated, to the sound of the phone ringing. It took him a moment to recall himself to his surroundings. The phone was picked up and he heard Lara’s voice. Glancing at his watch he saw that it was one-thirty: he had slept for two hours.
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