D&P21 - Good Morning, Midnight

by Reginald Hill

  That’s the way he died, too. And my mother. I was seventeen, going on eighteen, all fixed to start college in the fall, down in Hartford. That’s in Connecticut, next state south. Pa’s choice. He said there was plenty of work in Hartford and he was planning to move us there anyway. Planning! Maybe after a life of suddenness he’d decided to try forethought. Maybe that was what distracted him, starting to think ahead at last, and he stopped paying attention to what was close up, like the truck he pulled in front of, joining the interstate.

  They were killed outright. When I got the news I must have gone into some kind of trance because I don’t remember much else till the funeral was over and suddenly I found I was surrounded by strangers, all concerned for my future. I heard myself telling them it was OK, I’d been going to stay with my aunt in Hartford when I went to college, so now I would just move in with her permanent. Someone asked why she hadn’t been at the funeral and I said she’d been on vacation in Europe and by the time she was contacted it was too late, but I’d spoken with her on the phone and she was expecting me in a couple of days.

  What made me do this, I don’t know. Maybe it was Pa in me, not caring to be told what he should do.

  They all bought it, everyone thinking someone else knew more of the details, and all of them probably glad to be rid of a problem that wasn’t really theirs.

  There was a bit of money, more than I’d expected, enough to get me settled in Hartford but a long way short of enough to get me through college. I’d been going to get some work anyway, but now I really needed it.

  That’s how I first got involved with the Ashur-Proffitt Corporation. A-P’s main plant wasn’t too far from the house where I boarded and my landlady told me they were always looking for canteen staff for the night shift, which suited students, long as they didn’t need much sleep. Well, I’ve never been a bed-bug, three hours a night does me and anything extra I can make up by cat-napping.

  I started in the kitchen but soon I was waiting on tables. They looked after their people at A-P and that canteen was like a good-class diner, with the execs using it as much as the line workers. Not so many of the suits around at night, of course, but always some.

  The man in charge of the whole corporation was Joe Proffitt. His grandfather had started the business way back. Like Maciver’s it had grown, but much faster and further, and the Proffitts had kept a controlling interest through all the development. He moved in pretty rarefied circles so we didn’t see much of him though I got to know him later. His man on the spot was Tony Kafka, still young but definitely the kind of guy stopped you talking when he came into a room. He often dropped into the canteen at night. I was told exactly how he liked his coffee served.

  Funny in view of what happened later, but to start with I didn’t care for him much. He was friendly enough, but not really seeing me as anything but a skinny waitress. He used to make jokes about my figure, saying someone ought to feed me up, how did I expect to keep a man if I didn’t give him something to get a hold of?

  The one I liked was Frank Phillips. He was a computer whiz in Accounts, so not much cause for him to be around nights, but soon he started showing pretty regular.

  He wasn’t much older than me, still in his early twenties, but a real high-flier and he seemed to know everything. The word cocksure was made for him in any and every sense. Gorgeous to look at and I guess he knew it. Never short of admirers so when he started admiring me, I was flattered. He seemed genuinely interested in me the way I was, asking about my family background and what I was doing at college. Deception’s habit-forming and I’d got used to answering family questions vaguely. But when he said, “Dickinson, from Massachusetts … not related to Emily by any chance?”—instead of telling him I wasn’t really from Massachusetts and spelt it with an “e” anyway, I heard myself saying, “Distantly, I think. But we don’t exchange Christmas cards.”

  I don’t know why I said that. Yes, I do. I was a skinny no-account waitress and I wanted to make myself interesting.

  We’d looked at some of Emily’s poems in the American Literature module on my course, but after that I really started to get into them. Stupid, eh? All because of something some cute guy says.

  To cut to the chase, what was always going to happen happened. We went out a couple of times. He said he was crazy about me, I was certainly crazy about him. When we went to bed he produced a skin. I took it off him and threw it aside. He said, “You sure?” I said, “No problem.” I guess he thought I meant I was taking care of things. What naïve little me meant was, this is for life, isn’t it? What need to take precautions?

  And when I found I was pregnant, I really believed the news would have him lighting cigars and jumping for joy.

  Well, the only thing he jumped for was the door and the only thing he lit was out.

  I didn’t see him for a week and when he did make contact with me it was to offer to pay for a termination.

  I told him, no way. By this time I’d learned he was the company stud, but it made no difference to the way I felt. I just thought that once he got used to the idea of being a father, he’d see it was time to settle down.

  Days of complete silence followed, became weeks. Finally after a month I sank my pride and made enquiries. That’s when I learned he’d got a transfer to one of A-P’s overseas subsidiaries.

  I was devastated. Then I thought, To hell with him! I can do this alone.

  Maybe I could have done, but I didn’t have to find out. This was where Tony came in. I’d have expected him to come on hard with heavy jokes about how he was pleased to see I’d decided to put on some weight after all. Instead, as my waistline thickened he seemed to start seeing me as a real person, not just some part-time waitress passing through. Could be he felt responsible when he found out it was one of his own people who got me in this fix. I heard later that he put it around that after Frank left Hartford they found he’d had his hand in the till, with the result that not only did he get dumped from A-P but he was going to find it hard to get work anywhere serious.

  So my time came. I even got maternity leave under the A-P welfare scheme, not something I was entitled to as a part-time casual, but Tony had given the nod. When my time came it was hard. You name a complication, I had it. By the time they finished with me, I wasn’t in a state where I was going to be able to have any more kids, but that didn’t bother me, not then, not when I found myself nursing my little girl.

  She was enough for me. She was my world, my meaning, my future.

  If that sounds big for a little girl, let me also say that she was lovely in the most conventional ways—big blue eyes, blonde hair already growing at birth and blossoming into a mass of curls within a couple of weeks, and a skin white as a pearl touched with the pink of a new day.

  Maybe that’s why I called her Alba. The dawn.

  The next few months were the happiest of my life. Money was tight but sufficient. With my own little bit, plus (thanks to Tony) my maternity leave “entitlement” from A-P, I was able to look after Alba and even keep my college work ticking over. Eventually I had to commit myself fully to my course, and also get back to earning some money. Fortunately there were good crèche facilities at the college and even better ones at A-P, so wherever I was I was never far from Alba.

  In the canteen, Tony treated me like a friend and I noticed that all the other execs were polite and courteous. No wisecracks or jokey flirting. I didn’t know then that Frank’s career had suddenly gone into a tailspin, but I guess word had already reached the A-P executive locker room, making everyone aware I was somehow under Tony’s protection. Not that he ever came on. It was like having Pa around to look out for me. Pa without the suddenness. Pa as he might have become.

  At college I was doing OK, considering I was getting even less sleep now than before. Like I say, thank God I don’t need much! When I thought of Frank I couldn’t feel bitter. Hadn’t he given me the best thing in my life, my daughter?

  Also, indirectly, he’d given me
Emily Dickinson.

  For my main course project I’d opted to do a study of her. A fine poet, odd, weird even, but she spoke directly to me. Sometimes I felt I was eavesdropping on my own thoughts. All those tiny poems. Reading them was like dipping my fingers into a casket of gems; I never knew what I was going to come up with but I knew it would be precious. Sometimes more than precious. Prophetic. For when the mood came on me, I even started using them as a kind of Sortes, opening my collection at random and rarely being disappointed in my expectation that something on the page before me would speak to me in a special way.

  But the casting of lots is not always a source of solace.

  I was working on my paper in the college library one day when I felt the urge to delve.

  I opened the volume casually and read the first poem my eyes lit on.

  Good Morning–Midnight–

  I’m coming Home–

  Day–got tired of Me–

  How could I–of Him?

  And as I read that first stanza, a bitterness filled my mouth like I’d bitten on a suicide ampoule and I felt a paralysing numbness coursing along my veins.

  “Miss Dickenson,” said a voice behind me.

  It was the librarian, his face a blank more expressive than concern. He said, ‘Just had the crèche on the phone. Could you get down there?’

  As I ran along the corridors, my feet beat out the rhythm of the second verse

  Sunshine was a sweet place–

  I liked to stay–

  But Morn–didn’t want me–now–

  So–Goodnight–Day!

  In the crèche I found alarm and confusion centred on Alba. She had had some kind of seizure and was now breathing shallowly, her face flushed, her eyes open but unfocused. An ambulance was on its way.

  As it bore us to hospital, the last two verses of the poem beat through my mind. They sounded at the same time valedictory and menacing:

  I can look–can’t I–

  When the East is Red?

  The Hills–have a way–then–

  That puts the Heart–abroad–

  You–are not so fair–Midnight–

  I chose–Day–

  But–please take a little Girl–

  He turned away!

  And that was it. The next few hours were filled with nurses and doctors and I could quote you every syllable of every sentence they spoke to me. But from the start, no matter how desperately I riddled their words, I could find nothing in them to show me a prospect more hopeful than that which Emily’s poem had already laid out.

  Good morning–Midnight

  It was midnight for Alba, midnight for me. The doctors spoke of cause. Acute viral encephalitis. But I could see only effect. My bright, beautiful, laughing, loving baby was now an unresponsive bundle of emptiness. I looked into those dull eyes and told myself my Alba was in there somewhere. But she was already far beyond my feeble outreach.

  She still had all of my love but it wasn’t enough, and I felt it was my fault it wasn’t enough.

  In the end they told me she was gone beyond all hope of recovery. Only the machines kept her breathing. They needed my say-so to switch them off.

  It was like they were saying, you’ve already managed to lose your child, now we want you to kill her.

  So I did.

  Goodnight–Day!

  11 • a feminist hook

  The tape hadn’t finished—Pascoe could hear the woman’s breathing, short and harsh at first then modulating into a softer, longer rhythm, as if she were pausing to get herself under control.

  He needed a pause too. He switched the machine off and sat staring sightlessly out of the window.

  A lost child. A lost daughter. He had been very close to that. And in this, being very close meant going all the way and beyond, as no matter what others told you of hope and urged on you of strength, you were already over the threshold and into the grey land of loss, of grief, of living death. He recalled his feelings on being dragged back from that land. Oh there was joy, and gratitude, and happiness almost painful in its intensity. But before that there’d been what later analysis made him think of as a Lazarus moment, compounded of bewilderment, and resentment almost, at being returned to a state where crossing that dreadful threshold still remained a possibility.

  This woman had been over that threshold. And hadn’t returned.

  He shook his head and forced his gaze to focus on the reality of the handsome Spanish-style house.

  Casa Alba.

  Oh shit.

  Casa Alba. Meaning, if his small Spanish served him, the house of dawn.

  Alba Dickenson. Named after the dawn. Whose death sent her mother leaping over the intervening day into midnight.

  Could it be simple coincidence that Pal had built his house in the same village where his stepmother lived and given it a name that must remind her every time she heard it of her dead child? Could he have been capable of such a piece of cruel mockery?

  And in relation to his own death, did it matter anyway?

  He was drawn out of this painful speculation by the sound of a car engine being driven very fast. He twisted in his seat to look towards the narrow country road, along which a bright red sports car was hurtling as if driven by one of the Schumachers with the other in hot pursuit.

  A red Alfa Romeo Spider. Hadn’t Sue-Lynn been driving such a car the other night at Moscow?

  The question was answered as, with a screeching of brakes of the kind which is usually followed by a very loud crash, the Spider span off the road and through the gateway with no more than the merest clipping of a wing mirror.

  It was a fine or fortunate piece of driving but it looked like it might all go to waste as the car came screaming up the drive as if its driver’s intention were to enter the house without bothering to knock. He could see Sue-Lynn’s face through the windscreen, so devoid of emotion it might as well have been a mask, and just when he was convinced that in an unlikely act of suttee she had decided to follow her husband at speed into the next world, she hit the brake.

  In a second manoeuvre worthy of a stunt artist, the car skidded to a halt, its back end slewing round and sending a machine-gun spatter of gravel against the bonnet of the BMW.

  Sue-Lynn didn’t even glance towards the other two vehicles as she slid out and headed up to her front door, almost as fleet of foot as she was of machine.

  And the woman in the BMW was no slouch either, observed Pascoe. She was out and heading towards Sue-Lynn, shouting something as she ran. He couldn’t make out the words but the tone was unmistakably hostile. He began to get out of his car.

  Sue-Lynn turned and looked at the approaching woman, decided she didn’t like what she saw or heard, and continued inserting her key in the lock, presumably with a view to putting the front door between herself and her visitor.

  It would have been a wise move. The well-built woman was alongside her now, still yelling incoherently and thrusting a sheet of paper in her face.

  Sue-Lynn looked at it and spoke.

  Whatever she said didn’t go down too well. The other woman said, “Bitch!” Pascoe was close enough now to make this out quite clearly, but not yet close enough nor indeed psychologically prepared enough to intervene when she drew back her right hand and launched a blow at Sue-Lynn’s head. No open-handed feminine slap, this, but a full-blooded feminist right hook that landed with audible ferocity on the side of Sue-Lynn’s jaw.

  She crashed back against the door and slid down it with an expression that seemed to have as much of surprise as pain in it. Her attacker loomed over her for a moment as if contemplating giving her a kicking, then ripped in half the paper she’d been waving in her left hand and scattered the halves over the recumbent woman.

  Pascoe said, “OK, that’s enough.”

  She turned, glared at him and said, “You think so?” then shouldered him aside and headed back to the BMW.

  He knew he ought to arrest her. Senior policemen couldn’t be witnesses to assault
without doing something. On the other hand with a punch like that …

  Too late now anyway. The BMW’s engine roared, its rear wheels span in the gravel and it was his car’s turn to get the fusillade, then it found traction and set off down the drive as if bent on breaking the Spider’s recently established record.

  Sue-Lynn was trying to stand. He said, “Are you all right?” and offered his hand. She ignored it and pulled herself up by the door handle.

  He said, “Mrs Maciver, I’m Detective Chief Inspector Pascoe. We met at Moscow House.”

  She turned the key in the lock and opened the door just sufficiently to slip inside.

  He said, “I’m sorry to trouble you so soon after your sad loss, but I wonder if we could talk …”

  She said with some difficulty—her jaw visibly swelling—“My sad loss? You mean my house and my income? That’s the only fucking sad loss I’ve had. But the bastard’s not going to get away with it, believe me! So why don’t you just piss off?”

  She slammed the door in his face.

  What’s happened to the old Pascoe charm? he asked himself.

  He turned away, then paused and bent down to pick up the two pieces of what appeared to be a computer-generated photograph printed on ordinary bond paper.

  He joined them up.

  It was a picture of a ruffled bed with on one side of it a woman in her panties wrestling with her bra, and on the other a man apparently having a problem zipping up his trousers over a semi-erect penis, both staring pop-eyed into the camera as if it were (and indeed as in the circumstances presumably it was) the last thing on earth they wanted to see.

  The woman was Sue-Lynn, the man was Dr Tom Lockridge.

  And it didn’t take more than a small proportion of Pascoe’s detective skills to guess that it was probably Mrs Tom Lockridge speeding away in the Beamer.

  There was a date and time registered along the bottom of the photo.