She searched in her sleeve for a handkerchief and blew her nose. She was calmer now, and when she continued her story it was in a steadier voice, her eyes fixed on a point somewhere near the foot of Catherine’s chair. “I managed to speak to Ben just before you went to France. Of course he didn’t want to speak to me, to see me, but I begged, I used every argument, I said it would just be for five minutes. He finally agreed. Just to keep me quiet, of course. But he agreed. He said he’d be back early from France, on the Sunday. He said you were staying on longer. He said he’d call me when he got in. I knew he wouldn’t, of course. I knew he’d .. . well, I just knew he wouldn’t. So I decided to wait for him.”
She wrapped her arms tightly around her waist, as though to ward off the cold, before pushing herself onwards. “I arrived at the house in the morning and there was no one in. I went to a coffee place in Portobello, and came back again, then one of your neighbours kept looking at me, so I went and had some lunch and came back again. I don’t know how many times I came back four, five times? Then .. .” She stiffened, her voice rose. “When it was getting dark I thought I saw a light in the house. I rang the bell and waited. And then She glanced uncertainly at Catherine. “I looked up and I thought I saw the blind move. Oh, I tell you, I’ve gone through it in my mind time and again! Time and again! And I’m never sure if it really moved or it was a trick of the light or ... You know how it is when you look up suddenly and it’s almost dark and you’re not sure what you’ve seen. But of course I was ready to convince myself that it was Ben. I thought he’d spotted me and was hiding from me, pretending he wasn’t there. I pressed on the bell and kept pressing and pressing .. .” Unwrapping her arms from her waist, she immediately crossed them again over her thin chest and gripped her upper arms, as though for protection. “I went and waited across the street. I was upset. I thought -Oh, I was in a dire state, Catherine. What can I tell you? Angry. Wretched. Crying my eyes out.”
Her voice had risen dangerously, her breath was coming in short gasps, and it was only by a visible effort that she slowed herself down. Then I realised I had to calm myself. It was no good being in a state like that. If it was him in there, I didn’t want him to see me like that. Hysterical, pathetic. So I went to the pub round the corner and cleaned myself up and dried my face and had a glass of wine for some courage. It must have been about fifteen, twenty minutes before I got back. Then .. . well.. .” She made a small agonised gesture, a plea to be spared the last of the story.
But for Catherine the story was everything. She said implacably, “You found the front door open?”
“Yes.”
Still Maeve hoped for a reprieve, and still Catherine wouldn’t give it to her. “Was it dark inside?”
“More ... dim,” she replied with a droop of resignation. “There was a light at the back somewhere. That’s why I didn’t see you to begin with. I stood in the doorway and called out. Not loudly, just a sort of hello. I called several times, then I plucked up courage to go in. And then .. .”
“You saw me.”
The tears had returned silently. “It was like the most terrible nightmare in the world to see you there. The blood oh, the blood! It was like a black lake. I thought you were dead. I felt sure you were dead!” A shudder snatched at her body.
“But I wasn’t.”
She closed her eyes at the memory of her relief.
“And then?”
“Then .. . oh, I wish I could tell you I did everything possible for you, everything I was trained to do! I wish I could say I went through all the right procedures! But my mind was in a state. I couldn’t think. It was like a dream I didn’t feel I was there at all. I can’t remember very much .. . Everything was all mixed up. I was crying and carrying on. I felt it was all my fault, Catherine. I felt somehow I was to blame! And the blood all I could see was the blood. There was so much of it! I was desperate to stop it. Desperate. I tried hankies ... I tried anything I could find. Eventually I don’t know how long it was I began to come out of it, to wake up, to think about what I should do. Finally I went and turned on a light and felt your pulse. I knew I mustn’t move you at least I knew that! I knew I mustn’t even straighten your head. But Catherine I completely forgot to check your pupils and your breathing and your airways and to make sure you weren’t choking. I completely forgot!” She cried in disgust, “Why did I ever think I could make a nurse! It was madness to think I could ever be a nurse!”
Refolding the handkerchief in trembling fingers, she used it to rub the tears ferociously from her cheeks. “Then Fergal arrived. He was everything that I was not. Practical and calm. He phoned for the ambulance. He did all the things I should have done checked your airways, your breathing. He went upstairs and found Ben and checked on him as well. Fergal is one of those people there is nothing he can’t do.”
A growing listlessness crept over her. Her grip on her arms loosened, her hands dropped, she settled back in her chair and closed her eyes momentarily as her head sank against the cushion. “Fergal told me to go and wait in the car. He said he’d deal with everything else. I wanted to stay, I was desperate to stay, but he made me go. He said it wouldn’t do any good if I was still there when the ambulance arrived. He said it would only make things difficult for everyone. That’s what I mean,” she said wonderingly, ‘he thinks of everything.”
“But, Maeve, why was Fergal there in the first place? What brought him?”
“Why?” Maeve echoed as if this should have been obvious. “Oh,” she breathed with a show of understanding, ‘because of Dadda! Dadda had told him to keep an eye on me. To follow me, really. Fergal was there to watch over me.”
Another person to be watched over. But the deeper realisations came to Catherine in slow stages, first as small nudges of suspicion, then as lurches of shock and comprehension. “Fergal was there all day?”
“Oh no, he didn’t come until that minute. No, I fooled him into thinking I’d gone to the doctor and then out with a friend. No, it was only when I didn’t come back .. .”
“But he knew where to come? He knew where to find you?”
She gave a single nod.
“He knew about Ben?”
Catherine missed her murmured reply, but then the answer was written in her expression.
“And your father did he know too?”
She nodded again, miserably.
Catherine’s heart squeezed coldly. “When did he find out about you and Ben?”
Maeve’s expression was full of pain. She didn’t answer.
“When did he find out?” Catherine repeated with quiet insistence.
“When I was ill,” Maeve breathed.
“He knows the full story?”
Her frown said yes.
At this, a whole succession of possibilities cascaded into Catherine’s mind, one building on another, each more disturbing than the one before. At each realisation she pricked with fresh anger and mortification. He had known! He had known all along! She pictured the scene at Morne, the tour of the garden, the lunch, and all she could think was: He looked at me and he knew! And when he wrote all those letters he had known then too. The letters that had given her such secret pleasure, which she had looked forward to each week this knowledge had infected every word. And in the midst of this long rocky storm of feeling, one thought wedged firmly in her mind. A father does not forgive the man who takes his daughter’s innocence.
Catherine picked up her shoulder bag to leave. “One thing, Maeve. The ambulance men found some panties under my head. They were yours, were they? You put them there to stop the bleeding?”
Maeve stared aghast. “Panties .. . Did I.. .? Oh .. . Oh.” She flushed and dropped her head. “Oh, I didn’t realise. Oh .. .”
“There were yours?” Catherine persisted.
“Yes, I ... always have some ... in case ... in my bag ... in case of ... you know .. . emergencies.”
Catherine assumed she meant emergencies of the feminine kind, and wondered at her fastidio
usness. “And the scarf, Maeve whose blood was on it?”
“Scarf?” she repeated dully.
“It was yours, wasn’t it?”
Again the confusion, the flush of what looked like shame.
“Whose blood was on it?” Catherine repeated.
“It was mine.”
“You’d hurt yourself?”
Her eyes slid away, her voice faded to a whisper. “No ... it was from before.”
Catherine waited silently.
“From .. . when I was bleeding and ... he cared for me.”
Catherine couldn’t disguise the incredulity in her voice. “That was why you kept it?”
Maeve nodded silently, with a heartbreaking tenderness, which Catherine could only gaze at with a kind of awe.
“I’ll be going now,” she said to break the spell.
Maeve jumped to the front of her seat in renewed agitation. “Oh, Catherine I’m so very sorry for everything! I feel it’s all my fault. I feel I’m to blame for everything!”
“Why? Don’t be silly.”
“But if I’d got there sooner. If I’d stayed outside the house and waited. I can’t stop thinking, If only, if only.”
“There was nothing you could have done.”
“But I might have seen him! I might have stopped him! I can’t help going over it again and again. I can’t help thinking that I must have caused it to happen ... I can’t explain. There was even a time when I thought She started guiltily.
Catherine asked quietly, “What was it you thought?”
Maeve gave a strange laugh. “Oh, nothing!”
But her fresh open face was incapable of concealment, and Catherine read something there that made her insist, “Tell me.”
“Oh, it was just.. . When I was in a state a real state! - I thought really, it’s nonsensical’ she made a face of disbelief “I thought it was Dadda!”
Catherine held her expression. “In what way?”
“Oh ...” Again, Maeve tried to brush it aside. “That he wanted to see Ben hurt. That he’d sent someone.”
“Does he do that? Send people?”
“Oh no! No!” In her horror, Maeve kept repeating this. “No, no. It was just me. I was imagining it! No, Dadda would never do a thing like that! No, never. It was just the madness in my head.”
The moment Catherine began to manoeuvre herself upright, Maeve leapt to her feet.
“Oh, Catherine, I’m so terribly sorry for everything.”
“Don’t feel sorry about the accident,” Catherine insisted. “You probably saved my life, you and Fergal. Someone else might have tried to move me and succeeded in finishing me off.”
“I didn’t even check your airways,” Maeve sighed inconsolably. “I didn’t check your breathing. Oh, I’m no use, Catherine. No use to anyone!”
When Catherine kissed her cheek, she had the sense of kissing a forsaken child.
In the car Mike said, “There was an item on the news, Mrs. Galitza. I
don’t know if you’ve heard ‘
“About the trial?”
“Yes, the man, he ‘
“Not now, Mike, thank you.”
A surprised pause, before he said humbly, “Right ho.”
She wasn’t ready for more; not yet. There was only so much that could be absorbed at one time. She needed to catch her breath, to make sense of her emotions. Her heart was racing; her heart was icy. She felt calm; she felt wild with bitterness. She kept thinking: How could he?
How could he betray me so deeply? And then, almost as passionately:
How could he destroy Maeve? She had no idea what she felt for him any more. She loved him, she despised him; she yearned for him, she felt sick at the thought of him; he was achingly familiar to her, he was a stranger, unnerving and suspect. One minute she strived to forgive him, to make allowances for his troubled nature; the next she wanted to be rid of him for ever. She hated to give up, but she knew it was essential to give up sometimes if one was to hold on to some shred of self-respect.
And all the time the facts kept racketing around her head, stinging and tormenting her: the whole year that it had lasted, the very year that she and Ben had been planning their future together, gone house-hunting, found and bought; the subterfuge that Ben had exercised so flawlessly, the late meetings, some of which couldn’t have been business meetings at all, the evenings when he’d reported on his day and must have reported lies; the declarations of love and devotion that had meant whatever had suited him at the time, nothing, something, everything.
But if the facts were hard to bear, the unknown was worse, because there was no stopping your thoughts then, the only limits were the limits of imagination, and just then it felt as though her imagination had no limits at all. She saw the two of them together, she saw Ben’s foxy grin, she saw Maeve’s childlike gaze, and for a while she let the images run on painfully, in the hope they might burn themselves out.
The car swept down from the overpass towards Padding-ton: ten minutes to home. Ten minutes to prepare. One morning recently, Catherine had woken to a vivid nightmare in which she’d been struggling in deep water, her legs useless because they were dragged down with weights. Lying there in half sleep, she’d thought dramatically, with a surge of self-pity: That’s how it is for me I’m drowning by degrees. I can’t survive any more! But in the full light of day she’d seen her situation rather more prosaically. You could always survive, so long as you took things slowly, with time to catch your breath in between.
Well, she was getting her breath back now, and as the car skirted the north side of Paddington Station, she had the strength to say, “Sorry, Mike what was it you heard on the radio?”
He met her eye in the mirror to check that he hadn’t misheard. “There was an item about the trial of the burglar, ma’am.”
“And what did they say?”
Again, the anxious glance in the mirror. “Not guilty of the GBH, ma’am. Guilty of something lesser.”
“Thank you, Mike.”
In the remaining minutes before reaching home she had imposed some semblance of calm. She thought: I’m getting as bad as Ben, all cover and pretence.
At the house, someone must have been looking out for her because the front door swung open as Mike helped her up onto the pavement.
It was Emma who ran out, crying, “We’ve been worried sick about you, Cath! Where’ve you been?”
“Is Ben here?”
“And your father. And Denise Cox. Where’ve you been? I got here sharp at four and you weren’t here! You gave me heart failure, Cath!”
“I left a note for Ben saying I was going out.”
“Well, no one told me.” In the frosty air Emma’s breath plumed sharply, like steam. “But come on in, darling it’s so cold.”
Denise and her father stood just inside the door, solicitously, like mourners at a funeral.
“I heard the news,” Catherine declared before she crossed the threshold.
“I’m sorry,” Denise said, stepping back to let her pass. “Sometimes these things happen, and you never know what you could have done differently.”
“Darling heart,” her father cried, wrapping her in a tortured embrace, ‘there’s no damned justice! None at all!”
Catherine sat down to take off her coat, and remarked in the same brisk tone as before, “I forgot to ask is he out and walking free?”
“One year suspended,” Denise said. “For the burglary. We lost the GBH on the alibi.”
“The damned alibi!” Duncan muttered furiously. “The jury swallowed it hook, line and sinker. Believe anything, these people!”
“Emma?” Catherine called. “I’d love some tea.”
Emma pulled the cigarette she was about to light hastily out of her mouth. “Of course, darling,” she agreed effusively and hurried away.
Catherine laid a hand on her father’s arm. “Pa, would you get my wheelchair for me? I’m too tired to walk any more today.”
“Darling girl, o
f course!” Clutching her shoulder, he compressed his mouth in a grimace of unbearable pride. “Walking! All this walking! I tell you!” He flung a look at Denise, inviting her to share a moment of celebration.
“Just explain it to me,” Catherine asked Denise once Duncan was out of earshot.
“He admitted burglary, but sixteen hours earlier. He said he’d broken in, taken the valuables. But that was it. He said he’d left the door open and unlatched, and anyone could have walked in off the street, and presumably did. When you arrived home at ten on the Sunday night, he had these two witnesses to swear that he was drinking with them in a pub in Soho. They were independent witnesses, that’s what really swung it in Pavlik’s favour. Neither knew him particularly well. No axe to grind. And definite about the date.” She made a face as if to say, what can one do? “And the legal team this top QC they made it watertight.”
“I’m sure they did.”
A door slammed above and Ben came running down the stairs, wearing his harassed face. “Christ, the phone it hasn’t stopped.” Twisting to a halt in front of Catherine, he adjusted his expression to one of grave concern. “Denise has told you?” He looked to Denise for confirmation before crouching lightly at Catherine’s feet. “What a bummer, eh, darling? What an absolute bastard.” He took her hands in his and held them delicately, with a sort of reverence. “Have to look on it as the closing of a chapter, I’m afraid. Have to look ahead to new and better things.”
Catherine always forgot how perfectly he could match his mood to the occasion. “New and better things?” She laughed darkly and unnaturally.
A flicker of doubt crossed Ben’s face before he too laughed, falsely. Duncan, appearing with the wheelchair, lifted his head enthusiastically to the sound. “That’s right, damnation to them all!”
Denise was pulling her coat on.
Catherine said jauntily, “This is goodbye then!”
“The case will stay open, you know. For as long as it takes,” she said. “We won’t give up on it.” And promptly spoilt the effect by dropping her eyes.
After she’d gone, they sat in the sitting room to drink the tea that Emma had made and few wanted. Duncan opted for a stiff whisky.
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