‘Um …’
‘I’ve booked a hotel overlooking the Keizersgracht.’
‘I’m not sure …’
A cloud passed in front of the sun. His brow knitted together.
‘What do you mean, “not sure”?’
It might have been easier to back down, accept the situation, and move on, but that had never been Ed’s style. If he saw a problem, he wanted to deal with it head on.
‘I mean, I’m not sure it’s right, just now, for us. I’m not sure I feel up to a holiday. I’m not sure I deserve one.’
The truth was I knew there was nowhere I could go to escape the one thing I needed to escape. Ed tried to hide his disappointment and, deep down, a shapeless fear this might be the beginning of the end.
‘Darling, you don’t have to deserve a holiday. It’s enough to need one. Or just to want one. I really think it would do you good to get away for a couple of days.’ He spoke softly. He had a better bedside manner than I’d imagined. ‘Change of scene. Somewhere completely new.’ I looked him in the eyes. There are eighty muscles in the eyelids and every one was working. I shook my head. I couldn’t explain it in words he would want to hear. ‘Fresh air. Or as fresh as it can be beside a canal. Every doctor recommends it.’
‘I don’t think so, darling, not just now. It doesn’t feel right somehow.’
He ground his jaw. ‘One night?’
I shook my head again and looked down at my book. I didn’t want to have this conversation.
‘What about somewhere round here then? Bath? Outside Bath? Just one night. The Pig? Royal Crescent? Money no object.’ He didn’t get it. Before I could answer he was sitting on the bed, pressing on, helplessly. ‘Come on, my darling, I promise it will do you good. It’ll do both of us good. I really think we need it.’
I tried to imagine how I would feel in some boutique hotel with its plumped pillows and feature wallpaper. I shook my head almost imperceptibly. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t articulate properly why not, and yet I had always been able to articulate my feelings, but I just couldn’t get the words out. It frightened me. Ed nodded. ‘OK, I understand.’ Then, as if he was the one who had made a decision, he leant forward and kissed me on the forehead. ‘I love you, I hope you know that, and I am unbelievably grateful for your support. I appreciate how much this thing has hurt you and I can’t say how sorry I really truly am. I only want you to be happy.’
His mouth puckered as he struggled to hold the line. I almost burst into tears. Although he tried to hide it, Ed’s eyes were glistening. The famous clinician, the man who had seen it all, was struggling to stay afloat. I wished I could throw my arms around him and say everything was going to be all right and we should go to Amsterdam to look at some of the greatest portraits ever painted and forget everything and have some fun, but it was impossible, I couldn’t offer him that. And I hated myself for it.
The following week, we – Ed and I that is; the children were in bed, probably awake, hopefully reading, Nell more likely messaging – were sitting on the sofa watching TV, waiting for News at Ten. I was trying not to be irritated by endless adverts for BBC programmes we would never watch. We paid a licence fee so we didn’t have to sit through adverts. Ed’s jacket was hanging on a kitchen chair, a diamond-patterned tie tossed over its shoulder like a college scarf. The night was hot-hot, the air still. It only needed the sound of crickets and we could have been on Barbados. Ed gave off a warm muzzy smell that might have been sweat but was not unpleasant. The first painting I ever completed was above the TV, a weeping willow, tight and symmetrical on a gold-paper background. The tree was on the Backs in Cambridge, visible from the room I had in my last year. I spent hours sitting on the wide stone windowsill, smoothed by generations of lounging undergraduates, and watched it sway in the breeze, dipping green fingers into the Cam. It was not bad for a first effort, good enough to fire my ambition, to ignite my hope.
The clock hit ten.
Bong – Thirteen dead in Homs bomb attack.
Bong – Rumours swirl around the solvency of a major finance house.
Bong – The Department of the Environment says building houses on the Green Belt is inevitable.
Bong – Man arrested in the hunt for the killer of Araminta Lyall.
Bong – Oh my God!
I looked at Ed. He didn’t look at me even though he must have felt my eyes sliding over his face like eggs in a pan. He’d turned surrender-white and was staring at the television, his jaw working. After a few seconds I said,
‘Darling?’
He shook his head. The TV started on about Syria. There’d been a bomb in a marketplace. Images of bodies covered by sheets at the roadside, the injured carried away on makeshift stretchers, the anguish of survivors, wild-eyed and babbling, platitudes from politicians who send us to war. The politicians who say they listen but never learn. Collateral damage. Every action has collateral damage.
Next a man with ridiculous enunciation started talking about stock market rumours a bank was in trouble. I tried to focus on his words but my mind was still on collateral damage, only not the sort that queued up on pavements to take their savings out when they lost trust in their bank. I couldn’t wait any longer.
‘What do you think?’
He was staring at the screen. He wouldn’t look at me.
‘Ed?’
‘Wait.’
I waited. I waited while an environmental man gave his depressing prognosis on the future of the Green Belt, the government explained what it was doing to alleviate the problem and an opposition politician who had cut the environmental budget when he was in government popped up to say in as many words that global warming was the government’s fault.
Finally, after what seemed a lifetime, the screen filled with that woman’s face, the Dering Street photo, before a female reporter standing outside Paddington Green police station told us a twenty-nine-year-old art dealer named Johnny Trumble had been arrested in West London that afternoon on suspicion of the murder of Araminta Lyall.
Ed clicked the TV off, exhaled deeply and lay back on the sofa, cheeks pallid and papery. I took his hand and held it, saying nothing. We sat like that for a long time but I didn’t want to speak because Ed had to make his own decision.
‘What do you think?’
‘I think …’ What did I think? My first thought was,
‘Who is Johnny Trumble?’
‘Never heard of him. No – wait, maybe he was at Pete’s party?’
‘Maybe he went back to Stokes Croft afterwards?’
Ed shrugged. Anything was possible. His memory of the after-party hadn’t improved with time. He lay back on the sofa again, shoulders slack, his lips tight. He wanted me to have complete silence for as long as I needed to turn things over. But I didn’t need to turn things over. I already knew what I thought. I had been brought up to tell the truth. Yet Ed didn’t deserve to be arrested, put through a trial, possibly go to jail, probably be struck off – and that was if they charged him with manslaughter, which must be the least we could expect. He didn’t deserve to lose everything. But we couldn’t let another man swing.
‘You can’t let another man swing.’
‘No one’s swung.’
‘You can’t let him go through this.’
‘He’ll get off. He has to.’
I didn’t answer. Ed would do the right thing. He just needed time to get there. Not least because he’d promised he would never give himself up and he was not a man to go back on a promise.
It wasn’t going to be easy, not for any of us. I could already see Philips’s look of triumph. He knew we were involved, he always had. Philips could feel it but he didn’t quite know how to get there. That’s why he kept circling. What happened to me in the street the other day would seem like an afternoon nap compared to where we were heading. Ed said,
‘We could at least wait. See if he is charged.’
It was a statement. It should have been a question. I could understan
d that. His face was parched. A great man was being taken to the scaffold and I was hauling the tumbril. For a moment I thought it was unfair he was forcing me to do this but he had to conserve his energy. He had plenty of battles ahead. I shook my head. Ed said,
‘He’ll have a thousand alibis. Probably wasn’t even in Bristol on the night it happened.’
‘Mistakes happen.’
‘If he hasn’t got an alibi, then, of course …’
‘It could ruin him, regardless. Time on remand. No smoke without fire.’
‘I promised I would never give myself up. For the children’s sake. And yours. For all of us.’
‘I know. I understand. But there’s no choice now.’ I touched his cheek. It was unexpectedly hot. ‘You can explain everything. Everyone will support you. Everyone will know you would never have done it on purpose. They’ll know it was an accident, that there wouldn’t have been any intent. Your character references, the good you do, the stream of satisfied patients, no one could have better character witnesses. At the absolute worst they’ll go for manslaughter.’
‘At the absolute best they’ll go for manslaughter.’ He paused. There was bitterness in his voice but also anguish and, that rare beast for Ed, incomprehension. He genuinely didn’t know what to do. ‘It might have been manslaughter if I’d put my hand up immediately, but after a month of running round like headless chickens, taking me in for questions and letting me go, the police will want their pound of flesh.’
He looked pleadingly at me. Gone was the power, the certainty that had driven him onwards and upwards. This was the man I married laid bare. For a moment I was wrong-footed, tempted to follow his suggestion to wait and see, but then I remembered that woman, imagined her chalked body lying by the fireplace, police ‘do not cross’ tape hanging as limply as last Christmas’s decorations, and I shuddered. I thought about the adultery that started it all. I felt the fear of Johnny Trumble and imagined how he must be suffering, his parents too. I couldn’t watch him swing. I said,
‘Sanity will prevail.’
He was quiet for a moment, feeling his way to the conclusion, before sighing and saying,
‘If that’s what you want.’
It was the sound of defeat, as if all the air had left his body. This was the man who’d set out to be the finest obstetrician in England and, Gatsby-like, his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. Yet slumped on the sofa in the gloaming he was already less imposing, his face as green as the light at the end of Daisy’s dock. I had seen that look in men who had lost their confidence, most obviously Matt, in the stoop of the recently unemployed. Tears welled but I tried not to show them. It was going to be hard enough for Ed without me crying. The last thing he needed to worry about was how we would cope. We would cope. We would cope in the same way I coped with the death of my father, by carrying on. We would cope in the way Matt had never been able to, by carrying on. Keep on keeping on, the writer wrote. Does that suggest hardness, or lack of empathy, simple realism, or ice in the heart of the artist? It doesn’t matter. I loved Ed, that’s what he needed to know, but we couldn’t let someone else go down for murder.
I glanced across at him. He was leaning back on the sofa, his head against the cold radiator. What was he thinking? When finally he spoke he sounded hoarse, as if someone had stolen the carry from his voice.
‘Will you wait?’
I nodded, holding back the tears.
‘We’ll wait.’
‘For three years?’
‘Yes.’
‘Ten?’
‘It won’t be ten, my darling.’
‘Fifteen? What do you get for murder?’
‘We’ll wait.’
I spoke softly, comfortingly, but even as I did so I knew I didn’t know the answer. Who could predict the future?
Ed nodded, but his look told me he understood. The tension of the past few weeks was dissolving in my stomach, being replaced by a different, emptier feeling, one no amount of ‘bring it on’ chutzpah could hide. Whatever route we chose, this was going to be a lonely road for all of us, Nell and Arthur especially, and particularly if I went down too for being an accessory after the fact, sheltering a criminal, cooking lunch for a murderer, whatever it was they hit you with. All I knew about prison had been gleaned from occasional glimpses on News at Ten and in colour supplements: creamy brick walls, safety nets hanging from metal walkways, steel doors with chunky bolts, burly warders, clanking keys, the odour of sadness and defeat, the bullying, the homemade tattoos, the apathy and ennui. Doing time, literally. Casual but extreme violence, lock-downs, claustrophobia. There would be no sympathy or joy. No colour. What did Paul Klee say? ‘Colour and I are one. I am a painter.’ I suddenly felt cold even though the temperature was still somewhere up in the seventies and the air was hanging as hot and heavy as a jazz note in Preservation Hall.
With a superhuman effort Ed dragged himself up off the sofa. He proffered a hand. I took it and he lifted me up. I could feel his sinewy strength, the sense of purpose that attracted me to him all those years ago. We stared into each other’s eyes. His were misty grey, the pupils like insects in fluid.
‘Let’s sleep on it,’ he said.
I nodded and touched his cheek. I knew how I would feel in the morning.
What do you take to the police station when you are going to confess to manslaughter, possibly be charged with murder, and may not see your own front door again for months if not years? Old hat for the recidivist, as unfathomable for the obstetrician as a placental abruption is for the safe-cracker.
‘I don’t think you’ll need all that.’
I tried to splice in some humour, though neither of us felt like it. Ed looked at the bed as if seeing his haul for the first time. His blond hair was wet and dark and scraped behind his ears. His cheeks were flushed from the purging heat of the shower. An aquamarine towel with a flying porpoise hung loosely around his waist. His upper body was still in good shape, sleek and powerful, testament to weekly tennis, hilly Bristol cycling, a balanced diet, demanding work. What would it look like after months or years of limited exercise, mindless food, dreary work, mental inertia?
On the floor above, Nell shouted, ‘STOP IT ARTHUR, I SAID STOP IT, GET OUT OF MY ROOM’ as much for our benefit as his. Ed raised an eyebrow: the things he wouldn’t miss. We ignored her and surveyed the items arranged in neat piles around an overnight bag on the bed: electric razor, which I’d bought that day, cut-throats presumably being non grata wherever he was going, deodorant, toothbrush and toothpaste, a tub of my skin moisturizer, three pairs of folded pants and socks, two crisply ironed single-cuff ‘City’ shirts, a turquoise V-neck as if he was going to play golf, GAP jeans, a Boden fleece, Nike trainers ticked off. I wondered when he thought he’d get the chance to go running. There was the latest edition of the Lancet, an obstetrics textbook he’d been meaning to annotate but never had time, and John Le Carré’s A Perfect Spy, a hefty work for the man with time on his hands, its bookmark a photo of us on the beach in Mallorca, Nell glancing down at her phone and Arthur pulling a silly face just as the pre-timed shot went off. His herringbone suit hung on the back of the door, the Royal College of Obstetricians & Gynaecologists tie hooked limply round the hanger.
I put my arms around his bare shoulder, a muscular shoulder designed to protect his family, not check out on it, pulled his head down to my level, nuzzled my cheek against his ear and said,
‘Darling, we’re in this together. We’re all losing the thing we love most.’
Ed nodded. There was grandeur in his resignation. I understood how much the simple things of family life meant to him after his lonely upbringing and ancient parents. It was the spine running through every word as he listed all the boring things I had never had to think about: the gas meters and insurance renewals, where to find spare bulbs or the number of a plumber, how to access direct debits, what to do if the dishwasher shorted, who to call if the boiler broke, why we owned an Allen
key and where we kept it. These were things I had never known. From day one he had been my keeper.
‘ARTHUR, GET OUT, WILL YOU PLEASE LEAVE ME ALONE.’
‘Some things I won’t miss.’
‘Because you won’t have to. Think positive.’
He grunted. I kissed him on the ear.
‘When shall I tell the children?’
‘When I’m charged. When I’m away longer than I realistically would be at a conference. When my name’s in the papers. When the rumours start flying. When—’
‘When I think’s best.’
‘When you can’t put it off any longer.’ There were tears on his cheeks.
‘They have to hear it from me first.’
‘Of course.’
‘They’ll be sad you never said goodbye.’
‘I’ll say goodbye. And when they know what’s happened they’ll understand why I said what I’ll say even if they think it’s a bit weird as a pre-conference trip goodbye at the time. Anyway, it’s better if you explain. It’ll give them time to understand everything that’s happened, to know what I did and what I didn’t do before they have to see me or read about it in the paper.’
‘Online more like.’
I had been reading about Johnny Trumble online. I had spent most of the day digging out everything from broadsheet reports to Trumble bios, speculative blogs and bilious trolls. I had even come across my own name muddled up in there – @brazenfish8 sharing the view that ‘the painter woman with the doctor husband’ was the more likely suspect. The doctor husband glanced out of the window. The early evening sun laid bare Ashton Court where the parkland swooped and swelled to the woods in the distance, deer wilting in pools of shade on the upper slopes. A pumpkin-coloured hot-air balloon with Dulux written in giant letters was drifting towards the river. There was a burst of fire and height. This sort of thing just didn’t happen to people like us. I wanted to scream like a birthing mother but Ed simply inclined his head and said,
‘Or online. Best you don’t go there, my darling.’ He grinned mirthlessly. ‘I certainly won’t.’
What Alice Knew Page 15