Over

by Margaret Forster

  ‘I think,’ Ruth said, ‘he probably is, don’t you?’

  I was shocked. ‘No,’ I said, ‘he’s not mad. It’s just that his mind has become one-track.’

  ‘Isn’t that a kind of madness? Monomania?’ Ruth said.

  She thought Don might need treatment. It was fortunate that he wasn’t there to hear her say this. We had been offered counselling, afterwards. Our GP said she could recommend a psychotherapist. Don was livid. He told her that no therapy in the world would help to expose the truth of why and how his daughter had been killed and it was an insult to suggest that it would. All that would cure his blinding headaches was getting to the bottom of what had happened. The doctor gave him a prescription, and left it at that. He never went back, though the headaches continued.

  But that night, after Molly had said what she did about Miranda being to blame, Don was more distressed than I had ever seen him – more distressed, in fact, than when we were told about Miranda’s death, because then he simply hadn’t believed it. He didn’t weep openly that night, when Molly had gone to bed and we were still up, but his voice wavered and I knew he was almost afraid to speak at all in case he lost control. ‘What is wrong with me?’ he said. ‘Why does she have to leave? Why does she have to say things like that about Miranda?’ And I lost a perfect opportunity to enlighten him. I couldn’t bear his misery, and so I comforted him, and told him there was nothing wrong with him, he was a wonderful father. I said it was natural that Molly should want to go abroad – it was exciting, she would have wanted to go off whatever had happened, probably would have gone sooner, before now. I even said it had nothing to do with her twin dying (and I didn’t take up what she’d said about Miranda). But I did at least manage to point out that he had hurt Molly by saying that she’d disappointed him; and he had the grace to acknowledge this and be ashamed. In the morning he apologised. Molly said, ‘It’s OK, Dad. I understand.’

  And I think she did. I suspect that after all she understood more than I did, at the time, about her father.

  *

  Pat has written to me. Not the same day that Ruth visited, so soon after I’d met Lynne, but the same week. Of the three of us, Pat writes most, though every now and again there’ll be a long catch-up phone call. I don’t actually see her often. She lives too far away to be able to come to London more than once a year. She lives in Scotland, near Perth. Since she left teaching, she’s done a variety of jobs – they seem to change every time I hear from her, but they are all to do with being outdoors, working as a ranger, or an instructor at a sports centre, that kind of thing. Pat skis, rock-climbs, runs. She’s fantastically fit, even now.

  No one expected Pat to stay in Scotland. The attraction seemed to be the landscape – she loved the mountains, the wild coast, especially the coast. She sailed. She knew about boats and engines and storms at sea. Don had several long telephone conversations with her, afterwards, which I’m sure were a great trial to her, but she put up with them for his sake. They exchanged letters, too. Somehow, Don was not pleased with whatever Pat wrote. I didn’t read her letters to him. He tried to get me to, but I said they would be too technical for me, and Don must have thought I was right because he didn’t press me. In her letters to me, Pat never mentioned anything she was sharing with Don. All she wrote, once, was that she feared he was ‘barking up the wrong tree’.

  Pat rented a cottage in Dunblane for a short time, when she was working at a fitness centre in Gleneagles. It was odd, seeing the postmark on Pat’s letters. Impossible not to associate it with the senseless deaths of those children. I remember how, at the time, Don seemed to find my appalled fascination with the whole terrible story repugnant. ‘How can you watch this?’ he asked, as I sat, stunned, in front of the television, as it showed parents, mostly mothers, running towards the school, fear tightening their faces. He pointedly left the room. And when he heard me tell a friend that I knew someone who used to live in Dunblane, he was disgusted, asking why on earth I had to mention that. He said it was as if I were boasting, straining so hard to make some connection, and the connection anyway was so tenuous as hardly to exist. His own attitude was one of sympathetic detachment. ‘The man was clearly mad,’ he said, ‘and no one can guard against the random actions of that kind of madman.’

  But I know that if Miranda had been one of those sixteen children Don would not have accepted that nothing could have been done to control Hamilton and prevent the murders. He would have been ruthless in searching out which person or system was to blame, and in establishing how a man so clearly deranged could have escaped detection. The moment the campaign was launched to control licences for handguns, Don would have been at the forefront, speaking and writing and agitating – as others did – until our gun controls became the tightest in the world. Once it was revealed, as I believe it was, that there had been three police reports in existence detailing that Hamilton had struck children at camps he helped to run, and yet no prosecution had taken place, there would have been no restraining Don. He would have had his target and would have pursued it relentlessly: someone would have been called to account. And then his rage would have found some outlet, and because Hamilton had killed himself there would have been some kind of end to it all.

  I don’t know if it would have helped that other parents would have been sharing his misery. I doubt it. There would have been no comfort in that sort of solidarity for Don. Maybe for me, though. To have other women experiencing the same agony, weeping together, knowing others truly could say they understood. And for me, if not for Don, there would have been comfort in joining in things that were done afterwards. I remember stained-glass windows were designed with symbols – I think snowdrops – for each child, a beautiful memorial to them. I would have liked that. I wouldn’t have wanted the attention those stricken parents received, the arrival of the politicians and the media, but afterwards, to have been able to band together, have an aim … I am appalled at the way my mind runs and yet I cannot always control it. I am maudlin, I am morbid, I do think these things. I am always terrified that I will betray myself and reveal such sickening thoughts. The shame would be unbearable.

  *

  Pat is coming to London next weekend, my first guest in this flat. She is coming to attend a meeting on Friday about the Olympics – she’s very active on all kinds of sports committees. Her event, when we were all at college, was hurdling, though she’s too old now to think about competing. She was brilliant at it, a sight to see, flying down the track, leaping over the hurdles so effortlessly. We used to go to all the events she entered and cheered like mad, knowing that none of the rest of us could have cleared a single hurdle.

  People (not us) used to wonder if Pat was gay, but she wasn’t, isn’t. Her clothes don’t help the general impression. Tracksuits may have been popular at one time, but not the sort Pat wears, the strictly professional type. At our wedding, Pat was a bridesmaid, together with Lynne and Ruth. The bridesmaid thing was a bit of a joke at first but as my mother began seriously planning the wedding it became less and less of one. She wanted the bridesmaids to be ‘proper’ bridesmaids, in long dresses and with flowers in their hair. I’d thought they could just wear a summer dress of their choice, maybe in the same colour, but Mum wasn’t having it. Since the whole church wedding lark was to please her – I did a staggering amount of things in those days to please her – I found myself giving in. Lynne and Ruth didn’t mind (in fact Lynne definitely liked the idea) but Pat was worried. ‘I’ll look a fool,’ she said. I said, Nonsense, of course she wouldn’t, but the truth was that she did look uncomfortable and awkward, and I felt guilty. I’d chosen pale yellow – ‘primrose’, my mother corrected – as the colour, but the style was suggested by Lynne, and I agreed, since she was the fashionable one. I don’t think Lynne was being malicious, but the Empire line, which she and Ruth wore gracefully, did not suit Pat.

  We talk a lot about Pat, wondering whether she is happy. I think she is. Ruth thinks she would have loved chil
dren. Afterwards, when Pat wrote, the first letter I got, she said that to lose a child was the worst thing in the world. She’d tried to imagine it, and couldn’t. It seemed to me an unusual thing for a childless woman to say. What did she have to compare it with, to make it the ‘worst’? How could she understand an emotional tie she had never had? But then she wasn’t claiming, as so many others did, to understand anything at all except the pain we felt. Hers was one of the few letters Don could bear to read. He’d always thought Pat ‘sensible’. Of my three close, old friends she was the one he liked best. He never thought her the least bit ‘butch’ either, saying there was nothing more feminine than Pat’s complexion, and it was Don who pointed out to me how elegant Pat’s hands and wrists were, something I’d never noticed. I wanted to pass his compliment on but I thought I might sound patronising or that it might embarrass her, so I didn’t.

  *

  We went on a school outing today, the entire Infants, in three coaches. I’m never sure that these trips are achieving what they are supposed to achieve for the very young children. The excitement is tremendous but so is the tension – who will sit with whom, and all that. And then many of my children have never been in a coach, or even a bus, some because they are taken everywhere by car and some because they walk everywhere, with ‘everywhere’ being a strictly limited area between flats and shops and sometimes the park. Coaches are quite scary for some of them and bewilderment can overcome the most timid. Hussain is terrified. I don’t think he has ever been in any kind of vehicle. It’s amazing that his mother gets him to school at all, and she took some persuading that it is the law and that he must come.

  Paige, of course, has been in aeroplanes as well as buses, cars, and coaches, and gave us all an account of her travels as we waited to board. She stands head and shoulders above the other five-year-olds – God knows what her mother feeds her on. The other children are intimidated by her and yet at the same time they admire her and want her to be their friend. She’s a bully in the making but she won’t have everything her own way. Sita will challenge her before long, and Sita is cleverer though smaller. I sat Sita beside Lola, who needs a protector. Paige sat with Jeremy, which she didn’t like one bit. I gave no one any choice. Choice would only have led to arguments and then to tears, with those who haven’t made a particular friend left out and in a panic.

  We went to see a pantomime at the Hackney Empire. Gorgeous theatre, beautifully restored and renovated, not that any of my class appreciated the décor or architecture. But they did appreciate the plush seats and the glitter of their surroundings. ‘Is it a palace?’ Sita asked. Some of them had been in cinemas, and several in churches or mosques, but none of them had been in a theatre to see a live show. The noise really was exactly like the sound a flock of birds makes, starlings, when they are clustered together on a building and take off in a crowd, but when the orchestra tuned up and the lights went out, it stopped, except for rustlings and shufflings. It was touching looking along my row and seeing the little faces literally rapt with the wonder of it all.

  That was during the first fifteen minutes or so. After that, a measure of boredom set in among some of them, and the fidgeting began and the whispers, and I had to do some fairly fierce shushing. Jeremy had to take Yusuf out before the interval – he’d wet himself, laughing at the Ugly Sisters. The interval was a strain rather than a relief, with half of them thinking the whole thing was over even though Cinderella had not yet been fitted with her slipper or found her Prince. It was a long show, over two hours, much too long for their age group. On the way back to school, some of them fell asleep and didn’t wake up when the coach stopped. Jeremy and I had to carry them into the classroom. I carried Lola. She’s small and light. Her little body in my arms felt so fragile. I wanted to hug and kiss her, and had to restrain myself. I was careful not to look at her face as I cradled her head in the crook of my arm. It would have undone me.

  I knew what that was about, and was able to deal with it. It was obvious. Almost everything is.

  *

  Getting my spare room ready for Pat’s arrival, shopping for things, was a pleasure. It had been months before I could go into any shop other than a supermarket for food. The whole idea of having fun shopping was almost disgusting. The first time I timidly went into a proper shop, Heals, looking for a present for Ruth, who had just moved house, I had difficulty coping with all the goods on display. I went from department to department, picking items up and putting them down, not seeing any of them properly, and this dreadful feeling of uselessness washed through me – this was useless, buying things, it was irrelevant, I couldn’t be bothered. I bought a wooden salad bowl in a great hurry and left the shop. But furnishing my flat, I was able to concentrate. I was efficient and organised again, and I enjoyed it.

  That was before Don moved out of our house. I came home cheerful, determined not to let him spoil my mood. ‘I’ve been buying stuff for my flat,’ I said, ‘while the sales are on.’ ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘the sales, yes.’ And that was all. He showed no interest in my purchases, but then he rarely did. He used to like me being what he called a shopaholic, teasing me about my ‘addiction’, but never complaining about the cost. But there was an element of what I chose to interpret as unpleasant sarcasm in the way he said ‘Ah, the sales’, a touch of contempt. It annoyed me. Maybe I was looking for a fight, so that I could get rid of so much that I wanted to say. ‘What’s wrong with taking advantage of the sales?’ I asked. He just sighed. I should have left well alone, but I was tired of doing that. ‘It isn’t the sales that you disapprove of, is it? It’s the shopping itself. Go on, say it, how can I bear to shop?’ He looked straight at me, and said, ‘No, I won’t say that. I know very well how shopping helps you. It’s good that you can take pleasure from it again. I’m glad.’ He said it so quietly. I was ashamed that I’d been defensive, and unfair, but I didn’t apologise. If, at that moment, he had taken me in his arms … A laughable idea, by then. There was no room in Don’s arms for anything but the bundles of papers amassed during his ever ongoing investigations.

  I suppose, when he began trying to establish what exactly had happened to Miranda and the boat, I thought it might all be over in a month or so. Maybe Don himself thought that. Surely there was only so much that could be investigated, only so many avenues to explore. But no. Everything seemed to take ages. The simplest enquiry involved dozens of phone calls, dozens of letters going backwards and forwards. And Don was working, trying to hold down his job at the advertising agency at the same time. His job is not easy. The competition is intense, and the agency had just lost an account to Ogilvy & Mather – hard for Don to accept, not just because he’d been in charge of the campaign they’d been running but because he started off at Ogilvy & Mather and felt the blow personally. I’ve never understood all the rivalries but I know they exist. He worked long hours co-ordinating a new campaign – it was something to do with a sports personality, and he was pitching to one of the big sports-wear firms – determined to win the account to balance having lost the other. I appreciated this, but what I resented was how he spent his so-called leisure time. All his weekends and all his holidays, except for one, were spent in Holland or Sweden or Germany following up ‘leads’. When he was at home, it was as though he was studying for a university degree as he pored over instruction manuals to do with engines and boat construction, and studied maps and tides. I couldn’t follow any of it and soon he stopped expecting me to.

  There were piles of yachting magazines on the floor of his study, most with yellow post-it notes sticking out of them. The covers all looked the same to me – unsurprisingly, photographs of yachts in full sail skimming across the waves. The top magazine had such a photograph on the front, beside it a red box with white lettering and the words, ‘Going Solo made Simple’. I turned to the correct page, helpfully marked, I could see, by Don. ‘Sound seamanship is the key to successful solo sailing’ was the heading. There was a story about a man who sails a boat called the
Contessa 32. His character as a single-hander had been forged on a smaller yacht. When the rudder stock (?) sheared off leaving him without a tiller he didn’t call for help but worked his way back to port using an outboard and a 6-inch adjustable spanner. Don had underlined ‘6-inch adjustable spanner’. He had also marked the box labelled ‘Preparation’ on the same page. Ropes had to be to hand, winch handles ready, sail ties put where they were needed … ‘It’s preparation, preparation, preparation.’ Or in Miranda’s case, not.

  In the middle of this magazine there was a double page spread entitled ‘The tools for the job’. How long had Don spent trying to establish what had been in the toolbox of the yacht Miranda sailed? Weeks. And why? She wouldn’t have known how to use putty knives and ‘circlip pliers’ and ‘rigging knives’ and all the other ‘essential’ stuff, even if there had been time. But the information most heavily highlighted by Don made more sense: the radio. He was always convinced that Miranda must have radioed for help and that the fact that no message had been received must mean the boat’s radio was faulty. She should have had on board a VHF radio which was DSC compliant, whatever that means. It can apparently send and receive routine call alerts. The radio needs a Short Range Certificate (‘Did it have one?’ Don has written on this page.) But even if there was such a radio, and it had been licensed and programmed, had Miranda been taught how to use it? The magazine said the instruction course lasted a day. Would she have been on one? Unlikely. She was only crew for Alexander. But more weeks followed, inquiring about the radio – pointless. No detail was too trivial or irrelevant for Don. He became lost in a labyrinth of pointless information where I couldn’t follow or find him.

  3

  ‘YOU’VE NO PHOTOGRAPHS around,’ Pat said, looking thoughtful. I told her I managed better without them.