Literary Remains

by R. B. Russell

‘Well, the day he came back to London from seeing you here he had an accident. He was run over by a car. He was desperate to get back to you, but he was unconscious for several days. He wasn’t even able to walk with crutches for several months. He had to keep seeing specialists. And there were complications…’

  She stood up purposefully and looked as though she was about to leave the room. Instead she glared at Samuel, accusing:

  ‘He could have written!’

  ‘He was in a bad way for weeks; months even.’

  ‘He could’ve phoned. Or dictated a letter!’

  ‘He probably didn’t want anyone else to know his secret.’

  ‘That’s pathetic,’ she considered, looking away again. ‘He told me he would leave your mother for me. Why didn’t he just tell her about our plans? Why was it a secret? And why the hell didn’t he come back to me later, when he was better. I only told him to come back within a week because I was afraid he wouldn’t return at all. I’d have forgiven him for being late; a week late, a month late even. Bloody hell, even a year! Why did he never come back to me?’

  She was trembling, and Samuel could see she was setting her face not to cry. She tried not to give in to what she was feeling, but big tears ran down her cheeks. Her shoulders shook and she sat down once more, hiding her face in her hands.

  With some reluctance, afraid of being drawn further into something that he now regretted having started, Samuel crouched down beside her and put his arm around her shoulders. Now she seemed quite small and insubstantial. She struck him as quite bony, and there seemed to be such a gulf between them.

  ‘What the hell did I do to your father,’ she asked through her hands, not looking up, ‘that he couldn’t come back to me?’

  ‘I don’t know what happened.’ He wanted to console her. ‘My father was a romantic. He took you at your word.’

  ‘Was I so frightening that he was scared of returning after my silly deadline?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘He simply went back to your mother?’

  ‘Yes, but he had no choice. Somebody had to look after him while he convalesced. If it’s any help, they never really got on after the accident.’

  ‘No! That’s no help at all. It makes me feel worse that I did that to him. When he didn’t come back to me I assumed it was because he was happier with her. But please excuse me. I must pull myself together.’

  Samuel gratefully removed his arm and she sat up, forced a smile and wiped away the tears with the sleeves of her dress.

  ‘Look at you; a young man having to put up with a stupid old woman and her decade-old disappointments in love. All this time I’ve been wondering whether your father would one day have the courage to come back. But for the last three years he wasn’t going to because he was dead.’ She looked at Samuel: ‘How did it happen?’

  ‘A heart attack.’

  She nodded but said nothing, so Samuel continued:

  ‘I didn’t see a great deal of him after I left home. He must have come up here to see you just as I was going to University. I didn’t realise he was about to leave my mother for another woman.’

  ‘What am I thinking?’ she said, standing up once more. ‘Can I offer you a drink?’

  ‘Well, I’ve got something here for you,’ he said, reaching into the deep pocket of his coat. ‘I know from my father’s papers that you like it.’

  ‘Mari Mayans! Thank you.’ She seemed incredulous as she read the label of the bottle. ‘I haven’t seen a bottle of absinthe since, well… But do you mind if I open a bottle of wine instead? I don’t think absinthe is quite the right thing to drink right now.’

  ‘How about drinking it with red wine? He said you used to do that.’

  ‘Ughh, how could I have done that? And sometimes I used to mix it with brandy, like Toulouse-Lautrec.’

  ‘He said.’

  ‘Really? These papers; they must be rather detailed? Oh, well, no matter. It is good to see you, even if you do bring such bad news,’ she said awkwardly. ‘Your father meant a lot to me, despite what I thought he’d done to me. And it means a lot to me that you’re here, to explain… You will stay the night at least? I don’t get many visitors, and we can talk about your father.’

  ‘I wasn’t intending to stay, but it’s become later than I expected… I drove up from Southampton.’

  ‘Goodness! That’s far too far to drive back tonight. So that’s settled. The bed in the spare room is all made up.’

  She already had a bottle of wine open on the mantelpiece and a second glass appeared to be at hand. She poured the wine deftly and as she handed Samuel his she started to propose a toast:

  ‘To…well…’ and they touched glasses. ‘Well, to anything. Your stupid father perhaps? Sorry, I shouldn’t call him that.’

  ‘It seems right.’

  ‘No, I was the stupid one, telling him to come back in a week, or not at all…not realising he’d take me at my word.’

  ‘What about your husband?’ Samuel asked, then realised how awkward he sounded.

  ‘Thomas? We separated a few years ago, after your father let me down. He still lives down in the town.’

  She offered Samuel a cigarette, which he declined, and took another gulp of wine. She seemed more confident.

  ‘My father said that you’d given up smoking?’ he said.

  ‘In this famous record of his, I suppose?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He must have gone into a lot of detail in his papers then?’

  ‘He did.’

  ‘That’s rather unfair of him. I mean, you’ve now got the advantage of knowing about me, intimately I assume, but I know nothing of you. Did you bring his record with you?’

  ‘Well. It’s in the car…’ he replied.

  ‘Do you think he’d have wanted me to read it?’

  ‘I don’t know. Perhaps not. I mean, I don’t know who he wrote it for.’

  ‘Never mind. You haven’t taken your coat off yet. Perhaps you can tell me what else he wrote?’

  He took off his coat awkwardly and laid it on the floor behind the armchair where he now sat. He considered how to describe the large pile of miscellaneous papers his mother had inherited but had never thought to read; the papers he had almost thrown away but which had caught his attention the moment he started to look through them.

  ‘The first part’s handwritten, and is about him meeting you in London. It’s about what happened there, with the children, and the court case. It’s about you, ah, sort of becoming a couple.’

  ‘A short-lived and very unconvincing couple.’

  ‘When he was…twenty-five?’

  ‘That sounds about right,’ she drew in a deep breath. ‘It seems like such a long time ago. You’ll understand why I try not to think about what happened. I didn’t go to prison; I was never even charged in the end, but I was vilified in the press.’

  ‘He says that. And he says that he believed you were entirely innocent. That’s why he gave you an alibi.’

  Samuel was about to go on but was aware of a sudden and apparent drop in temperature in the room. The coolness emanated from the woman in front of him. She was looking at him aghast.

  ‘What did he say about the alibi?’

  ‘Just that he didn’t believe that you could have had a part in what happened to those children.’

  ‘Did he write that he was with me that night? Or did he say that he made that up just to give me the alibi?’

  ‘He doesn’t go into any detail.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I think I need to read these papers of his!’

  ‘I don’t understand. Either he was with you or he wasn’t?’

  ‘Exactly. And I’ve never known. You see, I had a drink problem and have never remembered anything about that night. I was too drunk. My employers didn’t seem to care that their unqualified au pair was an alcoholic. They went out and left me with three children to look after. I put them t
o bed, got drunk, and woke up in your father’s bed the next morning, three streets away.’

  ‘The night that it happened?’

  ‘Yes, the night they were killed. At around two in the morning all three of them were murdered in their beds, but he said I had gone around to his place at about midnight. I’ve never known if that was true. I was so drunk I could’ve been anywhere. I can’t account for what happened.’

  ‘And the killer was never discovered?’

  ‘No. The parents came back from the party to find their children murdered and their au pair missing. I can’t believe that I could ever have had a hand in their murder, in any way, but I knew that I should have been there for them. I should’ve been there to defend them.’

  ‘My father doesn’t seem to have held you responsible.’

  ‘Everyone else did. I was their main suspect until your father supplied the alibi. And as the police couldn’t find the killer then the newspapers attacked the drunken young woman who had failed to protect the victims.’

  ‘But if you’d stayed there that night you might’ve been murdered too?’

  ‘Possibly, but there’ve been times when I wished that had happened. Then at least nobody would’ve ever considered blaming me.’

  ‘I know it was a long time ago, but there must have been, I don’t know, forensic evidence? Surely they must’ve had some idea of who the killer was?’

  ‘All they ever knew was that the murderer entered by the unlocked front door, wearing gloves, and smothered each of the children while they slept. They used a pillow that was never found. The parents blamed me, and I’ve always understood that. I’ve lived with this guilt all these years.’

  ‘Guilt for a crime you never committed?’

  ‘Guilt for a murder that I should’ve prevented. And your father saved me from life imprisonment.’

  ‘Without his alibi they wouldn’t necessarily have found you guilty.’

  ‘You don’t know what it was like then; the police, the newspapers, the family, all needed to catch the killer and it was as if it didn’t matter who that was. It would’ve been so convenient to pin it on me…’

  ‘My father wrote that the alibi he gave you threw suspicion on him as well.’

  ‘Yes. It was even suggested that we were in it together.’

  ‘For what reason?’

  ‘Who knows? What reason did the real killer have for murdering three innocent children?’

  ‘I’m pretty sure my father’s account of all that was written before the time he later tracked you down. He wrote that he was rather obsessed by the memory of you.’

  ‘He admitted that when he came up to see me, yes. He said that he’d always loved me, and me running out on him after the investigation…well.’

  ‘So why did you leave him?’

  ‘It wasn’t really your father I left, but London. I had no choice.

  I was helped to move here with a new identity, to start again, and it almost worked. I met Thomas Lykiard, we married and I took his name. When your father turned up on my doorstep, just as you did tonight, I was so glad to see him. I wanted him. He had saved me all those years before. And he was also the person who could tell me what I’d done that night.’

  ‘But he didn’t tell you?’

  ‘No, we skirted around it all, painfully. You don’t want to know the details, what with you being his son, but we had a wonderful week, and we didn’t discuss that night. And then he said he had to go back to London. I pleaded with him to stay, but he said he had to get back. It was probably because you were going to University, and there was something about his business. He was going to tell your mother he was leaving her…’

  ‘But he wasn’t able to come back up to you immediately.’

  ‘No, obviously not. And I decided that he didn’t return because that would have meant telling the truth about the night the children were killed. I decided that if he really couldn’t bring himself to tell me then it meant that I didn’t leave the house when he said I did.’

  ‘It wasn’t his fault he didn’t come back.’

  ‘No, not immediately. But then for years he left me believing that I was probably there when the children died.’

  ‘I’m sure that wasn’t the case.’

  ‘No? And how could you possibly know?’

  ‘I couldn’t, I’m sorry. I just meant to say…’

  ‘I know. I’m sorry too. I shouldn’t have a go at you. Whether I was there or not, I wasn’t in any state to defend them anyway.’

  ‘It must’ve been horrible at the time. But nobody could still blame you, not after all these years?’

  ‘Oh, I know that they do.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Ignore me,’ she shook her head. ‘The problem is that thinking about it fills me full of self-pity and self-loathing.’

  Sensing the awkward silence that was to follow she asked him how he had found her.

  ‘There was an address in the papers my father left behind. And he mentioned your married name.’

  ‘So why has it taken you so long to come up and find me? To tell me?’

  The wine made him feel slightly giddy. He realised that he had not eaten since lunchtime. He put down his glass while Clare waited patiently.

  ‘My father was always rather distant. When I read his papers I wasn’t sympathetic. I was angry that he’d considered leaving my mother. But, then again, I didn’t understand why he stayed with her if he had really loved you, as he claimed. I didn’t care about you. …though I suppose I wanted to meet you out of curiosity. I wasn’t particularly interested in his broken promise to you. But as time went on I felt I had a duty to try and find you. I never got on with him that well, but he didn’t deserve to be thought of badly by you. Although you told him you expected him not to return, you must’ve thought he’d made a conscious decision not to come back. I wanted to explain to you that it had been out of his control.’

  ‘That he was hit by a car.’

  ‘Yes. I went to see him in hospital. On my first visit he didn’t wake up, and I remember him as looking very old…’

  ‘He was unconscious for long?’

  ‘A few days, and when he woke up he was very confused and shaky. That was scary. We helped him with a glass of water and he seemed very strange to me. He’d fractured his skull and there was inflammation…’

  ‘I had no idea. All that time I was up here cursing him for not returning to me.’

  ‘I know that he wanted to come to you. He was distraught to find that he’d been unconscious for such a long time, and that they wouldn’t allow him to be immediately discharged.’

  ‘He told me he’d leave his wife,’ Clare said. ‘But afterwards I decided it was all rubbish; you know, the kind of thing men say.’

  ‘I seem to remember that when he was finally able to talk he did mention leaving her, but my mother said it was due to the concussion, and all the pills they gave him.’

  ‘He could have come back to me,’ she shook her head, looking down at her hands. ‘If he’d come back a month later, a year later even, I would’ve shouted at him, cursed him, but I’d have had him back.’

  ‘I don’t think that he believed you would.’

  She put out the cigarette and poured out more wine into both of their glasses. Then she lay back in her chair, looking at the ceiling.

  ‘I don’t know what to think,’ she considered. ‘After all these years of wanting to believe that something like that had happened, and not wanting to believe it… And then you turn up out of the blue.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I should’ve phoned first.’

  ‘Yes, you could’ve given me some warning, and given me time to prepare myself.’

  ‘I thought that if I explained on the phone then there was a chance that you wouldn’t have understood, and I wouldn’t have been able to explain properly.’

  ‘A fine excuse.’

  ‘Perhaps. I did get close to phoning a couple of times. And right up to the moment I walked up
to your house I thought I might well turn back and not see you at all.’

  She sat forward:

  ‘I’m glad you did. There’re too many things I’ve never understood. I don’t suppose anybody’s life is so well plotted as to make sense at the end: there never is a neat final scene in which the clever detective explains who did it.’

  ‘I wish I could explain.’

  ‘It’s too much to expect,’ she sighed. ‘In lieu of explanation, let’s try alcohol? Stay here and I’ll get another bottle.’

  She stood up, but did not immediately leave the room. She looked down at him once more.

  ‘You think that your father was distant towards you because of me,’ she suggested.

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘No, but I sensed it.’

  ‘My father’s mind was always elsewhere. He only engaged with the external world, our world, on a superficial level.’

  ‘You judge him harshly.’

  ‘I’ve every right to. He was a dull man.’

  ‘To you, perhaps, but what was going on inside his head?’

  ‘Who cares? It’s how you externalise yourself that’s important. How you show love, or friendship, or creativity.’

  ‘But we all live inside our own heads. We’re all prisoners of our own minds. We all see the world differently, individually. What you see here, right now, is not necessarily what I see.’

  ‘Okay, so we interpret things differently, but we all see the same things on the surface.’

  ‘Do we?’

  And she turned and left the room.

  Samuel blamed the wine for his inability to understand her. She came back with another bottle that she passed to him to open. While he did so she went to an old record player by the window and turned it on.

  ‘Enrico Caruso,’ she said. ‘Una furtiva lagrima by Donizetti. Your father and I both loved this recording…’

  ‘And it was on your turntable, waiting…?’

  ‘We’ve always been waiting.’

  ‘Who’s we?’

  ‘Everyone concerned with what happened that night.’

  ‘You don’t think my father told the truth?’

  ‘I don’t know. I was waiting for him to look me in the eye and say, categorically, that I had already left the house when it happened; that I was simply negligent, a bad au pair. The parents wanted to hear him say I’d turned up after the event and that he’d lied. The newspapers didn’t care what he said as long as they could blame someone.’