“Sun safely over the yardarm, I think. Not drinking alone, am I? What about you, Ben?”
Ben flicked a thoughtful glance at Catherine. “No, Duncan, not for the moment.”
“Emma?” Duncan asked with mock despair.
“No, I’m going to stick with tea,” Emma said, directing a comp licit smile at Catherine, as if to show that she was prepared to stand by her even in the smallest things.
Securely ensconced in an armchair with his glass cradled to his chest, Duncan launched forth on the subject of juries and their deplorable gullibility, and a favourite lament the lack of education among the populace as a whole. Emma, on the other hand, was more inclined to put the jury’s failure down to the modern practice of passing the buck, of ducking every type of responsibility that society asked of them, responsibility for themselves, their families, their health and welfare. Citizenly responsibilities came way down their list of priorities, in fact so close to rock bottom as made no difference. Now it was a who-cares-and-stuff-everybody-else society. Most people’s aim was to get by with the minimum bother. The jury had found it easier to let Pavlik off than go through the mental effort of weighing up the evidence.
Duncan waved his glass airily and proclaimed that this proved his point precisely, it was the fault of appalling educational standards.
And all the while, Catherine gazed out into the black, dead garden and felt Ben watching her.
Finally, when Duncan and Emma had heartily agreed on the underhand tactics of the defence lawyers and the CPS’s lamentable cross-examination of the alibi witnesses, who’d obviously been put up to it you could tell by the shiftiness in their eyes a silence fell. By chance, everyone looked at Catherine at the same moment.
“I want to thank you for your support,” she said, ‘for everything you’ve done for me. But now I want you to go.”
Emma must have caught something in her tone because as she bent to kiss her goodbye she said, “You all right, darling?”
“Me?” Catherine declared in a voice that was pitched too high. “I’m fine!”
Duncan, shielded by good intentions, oblivious to the finer nuances of atmosphere, beamed happily at her. “There’s my girl! Leave you to a cosy evening, my darling. Just know that we all love you. In my case, to absolute bits!”
He planted a loud kiss on her cheek. As he drew back, Catherine saw a face on which life and love and loss had left no mark, and could only envy him.
“Well!” Ben said a little too brightly once he had seen them out.
“Would you like that drink now, Moggy?”
“You have one.”
Unable to gauge her mood, he eyed her warily. “Don’t want to drink alone.”
“I’ve gone on the wagon, so I’m no good to you.”
“Is there something wrong?” he asked solicitously. “I mean, is it the trial or something else?” He sat down in the chair next to her and, sitting forward with his arms resting on his knees, offered a cautious smile.
The games that she might play. The traps that she might lay for him before delivering up the series of ugly little truths that would mark the point of no return. The temptation was there, part of her wanted the satisfaction of humiliating him, yet the victories would be cheap, the process ant agonising and at the end of the day she yearned for peace.
“It’s over,” she said a little unsteadily. “Between you and me. It’s all finished. I know about Maeve. I know about the phone calls everything. And I don’t think there can be any going back, do you? So I’d like you to leave. I’d like you to move out.”
For a full five seconds he didn’t move. His eyes stayed fixed on hers. She felt he was weighing up the various approaches he might take and finding them all wanting.
“Oh, Moggy, I’m so terribly sorry,” he cried at last, in a racked and hoarse voice, and she realised that he had decided on the full and frank approach, the placing of his head on the block. “What can I say? It was unforgivable. I could tell you it was a last fling, I could say that I called a halt long before the wedding but she threatened to kill herself I was terrified that she would kill herself I could make a dozen different excuses, but He paused with a deep contrite sigh. “In the end there are no excuses, are there? It was totally wrong.” He dropped his head onto his hands, he gasped miserably. Raising his head again, he looked at her imploringly. “Moggy, if I could undo it all I would. Believe me. I’ve never stopped loving you. Never! In fact, I know this sounds crazy’ in the tiny pause that followed she had the feeling that he was assessing just how crazy it might sound ‘but it was a way of proving to myself how right you were for me, how much I truly loved you. It was a sort of confirmation of everything we were aiming for, if that doesn’t sound too insane. I loved you so much so much! but I still had this ridiculous fear of the commitment we were making. I mean, marriage is such a huge and daunting thing, isn’t it? And I thought that a last fling, a last sort of test.” Again the glance, again the measurement of progress. She was careful to show nothing in her face, and this encouraged him to continue in the same vein. “The crazy thing is that I knew straight away that it meant nothing nothing that it was just as I’d thought you were everything to me, Moggy. Everything. But by then well, she was being difficult, threatening to phone, come round, you name it. Basically to try and ruin our lives.” He slumped a little, he gave a long laboured breath. “I was weak, Moggy. Utterly weak. I can only say I haven’t stopped regretting it for a single moment ever since.”
“You were weak?”
He didn’t like that. His eyes narrowed, his voice took on a note of self-justification. “Look, I wanted to be kind to her, I tried my best to be kind to her, but it was the worst possible thing with someone like that. You’ve no idea she kept phoning and saying she was going to take mouthfuls of tablets. She was wildly unstable, absolutely hysterical. Someone like that you can’t reason with them. You can’t begin to deal with them.” But the conviction was fading from his voice. Standing up, he paced across the room and came back to stand over her, restless and fretful. Sitting down again, he declared in a tone of near despair, “I don’t want us to be finished, Moggy! I don’t want it at all. I’d be lost without you. Completely lost. We make a great team, you and me! Admit it, Moggy we’re good together!”
He was waiting doggedly for an answer. She murmured, “I used to think so, yes.”
Grasping at this, he tried his old winning smile, the roguish half-closed eyes: the handsome devilish son of a gun. “Could be again, Moggy.” He ducked his head to catch her gaze. “No reason why not! You and me. Hey,” he sang in the soft fluid tone he used to bring her round to his point of view.
Looking at him, she felt an immense distance. She thought: It’s all a technique, it’s all a game, it means nothing. And yet like an autonomic reflex part of her responded, an unbidden sway of the flesh and the heart.
He covered her hand with his. She looked down at it, she felt the warmth of it, and thought: But there can’t be any going back.
She murmured, “I’d like to know on the night of the burglary, were you expecting to see Maeve?”
He pursed his mouth at having to go back to Maeve. “See her? Christ, no.”
“But you told her you would.”
“What? No, no, I just told her something anything to get her off the phone.”
“So you weren’t expecting her?”
He pulled up his mouth in mystification. “Christ, no! Hardly. Why would I be expecting her?”
“No, I ... It was just something she said.”
He caressed her hand, as if to soften the mood again, and cast her a hopeful gaze. “So, Moggy .. .” Lifting her hand, he bent and kissed it. His voice was low and tender again. “Could be a team again, you and me. Hey? What do you say?”
Taking her silence as a sign of encouragement, he moved forward as if to embrace her, but she pulled her hand away very deliberately and said with a tremor of anger, “There’s been someone else though, hasn’t there, Ben? Si
nce Maeve. In fact -recently.”
He sank back onto the edge of his seat. “What?” He glared at her defensively. “For God’s sake, where did you get that idea from?” Then, with a show of indignation: “No, Moggy -absolutely not. That’s a crazy idea.”
But she had startled him, she knew she had. As if to underline this, he repeated in a blustery tone, “No, I’d like to know where you got that idea from. Was it that lunch with Rebecca? That stupid hotel room? I told you what that bloody hotel room was about precisely nothing. Bloody Casimir and his blonde! There was no story. What more can I say?” His eyes flashed angrily.
“And the perfume in the bathroom?”
He held her gaze just a little too long, she saw the flicker of realisation. “Perfume?” he responded, too late. “I don’t know anything about perfume. What perfume?” When she didn’t say anything, he repeated angrily, “What perfume?
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Doesn’t matter! You’ve accused me of something and now you won’t even talk about it.”
“It’s hard to talk when .. .” She took a steadying breath. “When there’ve been so many lies. All that time you were seeing Maeve. The phone calls. Saying you were being blackmailed. Was there any blackmail?” she asked wearily. “No,” she added immediately, ‘don’t bother to answer that. It’s not important.”
“Christ! You think I’d make up something like that?” he retorted, taking the offensive. “You think I’d pretend I was being taken to the financial cleaners! God, I may have done a few things but not that!’ Shooting angrily to his feet, he went across to the drinks tray to pour himself a whisky. Glass in hand, he leant back against the table and said sulkily, “So that’s it, is it? Just write the whole thing off. No thinking about it, talking it through, giving it time?”
“I don’t think there’s much point.”
He lifted one shoulder, he pushed out his lip in a Gallic gesture of indifference. When he drank, the gaze that met hers over the rim of his glass was blank and cold.
She said, “I might have felt differently if .. .” Here were the most painful words of all. “If I thought you still loved me.”
“But I’ve said so! I do!”
“I think you’ve tried very hard, but I think that it’s all a terrible effort for you. The burglary, the attack .. . we’ve both changed. I know you find it hard to love me as I am now.”
“So you don’t even believe me when I say I love you!”
“I suppose that’s it, yes,” she agreed.
“Great!” he scoffed sarcastically. “So everything’s been a lie, has it? All the good times. All the fun we’ve had together.”
“The fun’s over, Ben.”
“Well, that sums it up, doesn’t it. You don’t want to know. You’re not interested in even trying! You’re giving up!”
“Yes.”
“And just when the going gets tough!”
She said reasonably, “The going got difficult when you began seeing Maeve.” She suppressed the urge to say, and this other woman.
“The money I mean the money. This is when I need your support.”
“You’ve had my support. You’ll still have my support so far as the money goes.”
“Fat lot of good,” he mumbled.
They didn’t look at each other. The silence stretched out and settled around them like darkness.
Abruptly, he tossed the rest of his drink back and slapped the glass down. “I’m to leave then. Is that what you want?”
“I think it’s best.”
“Best? Best? Who for, for God’s sake? You don’t know what you’re doing, you really don’t!” He had got himself into a strange fury that was almost like a panic. “This is going to be the end for me. And for this house. The house’ll have to go, you do realise that, don’t you? Don’t think we can keep it because we can’t! It’ll have to go!”
She shrugged.
“You don’t seem to understand what I’m saying.”
“I do, it’s got nothing to do with MS.”
“It’s got everything He broke off with a shudder of exasperation. “You just don’t understand!”
She looked away. “Apparently not.”
He stalked to the door. “Well, don’t blame me, that’s all,” he flung back reproachfully. “Don’t bloody say I haven’t tried!”
She made herself a proper supper, no half measures. It was quite a performance, levering herself up to hook things out of the higher cupboards, hunting for pans that had been put away in strange places, but it was occupation, it was therapy, it was all the things that the unit encouraged. Occupational therapy, and get the hell on with life and, if that didn’t do the trick, there was always the help line and the quiet voice of the sister-brother, trained in advice and anodyne sympathy.
Well, she wanted to get the hell on with life, which at this precise moment was pasta with tomato and basil sauce, salad with dressing, freshly made and no modifying the recipe. She opened a bottle of vintage burgundy, one Ben had been keeping for a special occasion, and, pouring a glass, holding it up as if in a toast, made herself a promise, that if she couldn’t stick to the one glass she’d give up booze altogether, for at least a year, absolutely no cheating, even if everyone said she was miserable as sin.
She sat at the small table in the kitchen. Knife, fork, cheapskate napkin of kitchen paper. Meal in front of her, glass of wine: a small cause for celebration. She turned on the counter-top television and flicked through the channels. There was a programme she actually wanted to see. She thought: There! Not so very hard after all. Only her jittery stomach threatened trouble. The first mouthful went down, however, and stayed down, smoothed by the wine. Smoothed enormously by the wine, she thought as the doorbell rang, long and loud.
Her heart lurched and plummeted. He’d come back. He couldn’t bear to stay away. Then she remembered with both relief and disappointment that he had his key, of course he still had his key: he had no reason to ring.
Her father, then. Or Emma.
She sat immobile, wishing the world away. The bell sounded again, and still she didn’t move.
“Catherine?” The voice that came drifting down the passage was muffled, but unmistakably Simon’s.
She wheeled herself to the door and, unfastening it, opened it just a short distance, to show that she was not at home to anyone, not even friends.
He loomed into the doorway, shoulders hunched high, face pale, looking frozen or worn out.
She said, “Simon, it’s not a very convenient time, I’m afraid.”
“Is Ben here?” he asked.
His eyes gleamed in the half light. She thought: He’s come to sympathise about the verdict, he wants to wallow in it, chew over every detail.
“He’s out, but.. .”
“I can come in then,” he said, gasping a little.
“Another day, Simon. I’ve just made supper and then I’m going straight to bed. I’m sorry.”
“But I must see you,” he said with a hint of desperation. He put a hand on the edge of the door as if to push his way in and she heard the rasping of his breath, as though he’d been running. “Please, Catherine. Please.”
“Can’t it wait?”
“No,” he cried urgently. “There’s something I have to tell you.
Something very important!”
He seemed to stagger as he came in, like someone near exhaustion. When he turned to face her, she saw that his hair was awry and hanging damply over his forehead and his spectacles were spotted with moisture. As he struggled to speak she became aware of the breathlessness again.
“What is the matter, Simon?”
“I - I’ve got bad news.”
“What is it?” For a wild moment she thought: It’s Ben. He’s hurt.
“Pavlik,” he gasped. “He left court and walked straight into the arms of Terry Devlin’s people!” He seemed to think she should understand the implications of this because he waited in agitation for a reaction. When n
one came, he cried, “Don’t you see?”
Her stomach tightened. “No.”
He began to gabble, “His defence was bought and paid for by Devlin. Devlin! I knew there was somebody, I knew there had to be. Devlin went and found his alibi for him. The two men in the pub well, the police couldn’t find them, could they? Couldn’t find them anywhere. But Devlin did. Just like that. Must have put them up to it, mustn’t he? You see? Bought and paid for. And the legal team the solicitor, the QC all paid for by Devlin! All part of the deal! I tell you, he just walked straight into the arms of that man Latimer! They just -walked off together!”
“Slow down,” she begged, throwing up both hands.
Fresh damp had sprung onto his forehead, his cheek was jerking so violently that it brought up the corner of his mouth like a leer.
Beckoning him to follow, she led the way down the passage to the kitchen and pointed to a chair. “Sit down.”
She fetched a glass and poured him some wine. “Drink it,” she commanded, ‘and start again, please. Slowly.”
He knocked back half the glass, and it seemed to steady him a little. His eyes hunted around the room before they finally settled somewhere on the table in front of her. Between the staccato statements, his gaze flicked up to hers. “Devlin paid for Pavlik’s defence. He found the witnesses, the ones that got him off the charge. Pavlik’s there with them now, with Devlin’s people. Bought and paid for.”
“Are you trying to say .. .” She paused to get it right. “Are you saying that Terry Devlin hired Pavlik to come and break in?”
Simon gazed at her with a bitter expression, and nodded slowly and deliberately three or four times. “He was after the papers. The papers in the strongbox. He wanted them. And he got them.”
“Papers,” she repeated dully.
Leaning forward, Simon spoke avidly, his eyes glinting behind the misted glasses. “The papers that proved Ben was cheating him. That Ben had done a secret deal. That he was stealing all the profit. And.. .” His voice rose to a fierce note. “The generators? From Warsaw? Ben took an extra ten million and shuffled it on to Bermuda and the Caymans for his clients in Colombia. It was dirty money, Catherine. Dirty money.” He shivered with disgust. “The bank codes and transfer details were in the strongbox, and that’s what he wanted, Devlin wanted the proof. And he got it! He got the proof!”
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