by Karen Perry
It was a sad smile that he gave her. And then he traced the length of her brow with his index finger, and said: ‘I do love you, you know.’
And she nodded, then turned her face away, so he couldn’t see how much it moved her.
Hilary thinks about it now, all these years later.
What an odd summer it had been, preternatural with the sense of an imminent ending hovering over them all the while. The millennium drawing to a close with all the Doomsday noise it inspired. Y2K was on everyone’s lips, the way Brexit seems to have taken over now. It had made her feel … reckless.
She knows she was wrong about some things. Charlotte, for instance. With hindsight, she can see that Charlotte was deeply unhappy. The snobbery, the drinking, fooling around with other men, it all stemmed from that place of deep unhappiness.
Still. Hilary is not sorry she’s dead.
And one thing she knows she was not wrong about: he did love her. They loved each other deeply. The things they had done just to be together. All they had risked. The secrets they shared. The sacrifices.
No one will ever come between them.
14
Anton
Anton is skimming along the edge of sleep when he feels the touch on his wrist.
Instantly, his eyelids shoot back, and he snatches hold of the hand in a claw-like grip, his heart thumping.
‘Dad?’
His vision clears, sleep falling away, and he sees his son’s face, eyes filled with alarm. Anton loosens his grip. The hand slithers away.
‘Sorry,’ Mark mumbles. ‘I didn’t mean to startle you.’
‘That’s all right,’ he says, struggling to get up. ‘Sorry if I frightened you, son. I didn’t mean to.’
He says this with real feeling, but Mark is looking at Anton’s legs, which are lying outside the bedclothes. One of his trouser legs has ridden up to reveal the electronic ankle bracelet. Mark is staring at it.
Anton swings his feet to the floor and slips them into his shoes. ‘I just lay down for five minutes,’ he explains, reaching for his watch on the bedside locker. It’s mid-afternoon. ‘Where has the day gone?’
More of his possessions are lined up neatly – aftershave, glasses, a half-drunk glass of water. On the back of a chair nearby, a pair of slacks is draped. Apparently Mark notices all this because he remarks: ‘Have you moved in here, or what?’
‘Sort of. You don’t mind, do you?’
‘No, but wouldn’t you prefer your old room?’
He knows what Mark is thinking. After nineteen years’ sleeping in a cell, what is he doing bedding down in a child’s room at the back of the house? There’s still Mr Men paper on the walls, for Christ’s sake. But his old room is full of ghosts.
‘It’s quieter here,’ is the explanation he gives.
Mark skulks in the doorway, a bruised look on his face as if he’s done something wrong and is now worrying about the punishment. But Mark is no longer a boy and Anton has missed out on most of his childhood. For a moment, he thinks the look Mark is giving him is not anxiety but suspicion. Does Mark think it’s true what they say, that he killed Charlotte? Does he believe that conviction? Sometimes the urge to know is so strong that he almost blurts out the question. But Anton is wise enough to hold back, or perhaps he’s just frightened of the answer.
‘When I came in just now and saw you lying on the bed –’ Mark stops, assailed by some hidden emotion.
‘What?’
‘Just the way you were lying there. I thought you were dead.’ He smiles, clearly embarrassed by his admission, but seriousness lies beneath it and touches something inside Anton.
‘You thought I’d killed myself?’
Mark shrugs. ‘Something I read. About how some people can experience depression, heightened levels of anxiety post-release. Suicide rates are high among ex-cons.’
Anton crosses the room towards him. He would like to hug him, but he doesn’t. They haven’t hugged since Mark was a small boy. Years of formal prison visits have created a gulf between them. He makes do with taking hold of Mark’s wrist again, only this time with tenderness – love, even.
‘I’m glad you’re here, son,’ he says, and Mark nods, made shy by all this tentative emotion, then steps out of the room.
Anton follows him, but instead of taking the stairs, Mark crosses the landing and goes into the front bedroom. Reluctantly, Anton follows.
Mark looks around the room, the furniture, the bed made up in white linen, the rugs on the floor. He surveys it all with a thoughtful air. Then, crossing to the dressing-table, he picks up the bottle of perfume, uncaps it, and raises the neck to his nose. After a few seconds, he puts the bottle back, casts a half-embarrassed smile at Anton.
‘They say that smell can be a trigger for memory,’ he admits. Looking down at his mother’s perfume, the smile dies on his face. ‘I don’t remember how she smelt.’
‘What do you remember?’
Mark shrugs. ‘Bits and pieces. Her singing. Fixing ice-cream sundaes for me and Sandy and bringing them out to us in the garden.’
‘She loved you dearly,’ he says. ‘Both of you.’
‘Once, I was getting a hard time from this group of kids across the park. I was down at the courts and they started directing their tennis balls in my direction, trying to hit me. Mum saw it and she marched right up to one of them – the ringleader – and grabbed him by the arm. She told him next time that happened she’d break his racquet over his head.’
He laughs suddenly, and Anton allows himself a smile.
‘She could be fierce when it came to you two,’ he tells Mark. ‘A real lioness.’
‘Yeah. Like when that dog bit me. Do you remember? Mum went apeshit.’ Mark’s gaze lifts to the window. ‘I wish I could remember more of her.’
From far down below, there’s the call of a man’s voice: ‘Come on, Matthew! I said now!’
Both men fall still, listening. A door slams, and Mark leans forward to look, Anton next to him. At the window, they stand together, watching. Man and boy appear first, and then, after a few seconds’ delay, Leah follows. Anton finds himself craning his neck, peering down the better to see her. The sun gleaming in her hair, the swish of her long skirt’s green fabric.
It’s weeks since they’ve spoken.
In the garden a few nights ago, he had leant over the railings, a whispered shout through the open French windows, trying to reach her where she sat, upright, on the sofa, listening. ‘It’s not true,’ he had said. ‘Whatever it is they’ve told you about me. Whatever they said I did. I am not a monster.’ He had waited and waited for her response, but there had been none.
He feels the time stretching out between them.
‘How are you getting on with them?’ Mark asks, watching as the man and boy wait on the kerb for her to catch up, then all three cross the road together.
‘I keep to myself,’ Anton replies.
She is lodged deep inside him, like a stone. These past days, he has become a shell of a man, moving around the ground-floor rooms, following the sounds that echo up from the basement. He has lingered in the back sitting room, holding himself steady while listening to her music. He has sat in the dark on the bottom step of the inner stairs, the trailing sounds of their voices coming to him, snatches of conversation, glimpses of a normal life that has eluded him.
‘Sure about that?’
In the early hours, Anton had awoken with tightness in his chest – pain like a hot hand clenched around his heart. A panic attack, but it had left him weepy and shaken. He had gone downstairs and lain on the floor beside the piano, pressed his ear to the gap in the floorboards. Fear had driven him there. All he wanted was to be close to her, to comfort himself with the knowledge that she was nearby so that he wouldn’t feel so alone. But what he had heard were sounds of intimacy. The sighs, the private words, the muffled shout, and he had heard the sharp delicacy of her voice as she cried out, he – Anton – a sly witness to their coupling.
Pinned by Mark’s question, he feels flustered with shame. ‘Of course I’m sure,’ he says, but his voice lacks conviction.
He keeps his eyes glued to the three figures on the other side of the road, watching as they turn into Number 43, walking up the path, reaching for the doorbell. What are they doing there? he thinks.
‘It’s just I had a call from Jake. Asking about you. About what happened to Mum.’
‘And what did you tell him?’
The door is drawn back, and he sees Hilary greet them – the reddish frizz of hair, the short, blocky figure. His heart hardens, gives a quick pulse of resentment. He knows that it was Hilary who told Leah. It was the sort of petty thing she would do. Yesterday there was another letter from her, more pleading, more anguish. He had left it with all of the others, ignored.
‘I said you didn’t do it. That it was a miscarriage of justice,’ Mark says.
He catches his eye, and Anton feels it again: the press of a question Mark is neither brave nor reckless enough to ask.
‘That’s exactly what it was,’ he replies.
They walk around to Dunphy’s and Anton sits on the banquette, fiddling with a beer mat, while Mark goes to the bar to order. Across from him, an elderly couple are deep in conversation. The man is hooked up to a tank of oxygen, a tube running into his nose. It’s quiet in here, dark and gloomy compared to the brightness of the day outside. Anton’s thoughts drift back to Number 43 – Hilary’s house. It worries him, the thought of Leah inside it. He taps the beer mat against the table, agitated by the thoughts of Hilary pouring poison into her ear.
For weeks now, he has been avoiding Hilary, and still he feels her influence, the force of her determination. When he’d come face to face with her outside his house, he had been shocked by her appearance. The red hair! Jesus, it had thrown him. She was changed, no longer the young woman in his memory. It wasn’t that she had aged, it was that she appeared different from how he’d remembered her. Looking down at Hilary the other day, he’d had the weird impression that she’d put herself through one of those transformation programmes, a willing contestant to be taken apart and rebuilt as someone entirely different.
In truth, it’s not her appearance that bothers him – it’s the weight of her expectations. The letters she has written have been frantic, unhinged. They scare him.
‘Have you given any thought to what you’ll do?’ Mark asks, once he’s back with their pints, taking the stool opposite.
‘Not really.’
‘You have to do something with your time, Dad.’
‘You sound like my parole officer,’ Anton remarks drily. He’s grown used to Jim Buckley carping on at him about finding his role, making the most of his freedom. Once or twice, during Jim’s weekly visits, Anton has thought about suggesting they go for a pint. More and more, it feels like his parole officer is the only friend he’s got.
‘What will you do for money?’ Mark asks.
‘I’ve a pension.’
‘But that won’t kick in for another few years. You’re only sixty.’
‘I know my age, son. And, besides, I have my tenants downstairs,’ Anton says, and Mark shifts his position, begins rummaging in his jacket pocket.
‘That reminds me,’ he says, producing a wad of notes that he flips on to the table. Something grubby about the act. Anton sees the couple across from them glance over. ‘Your rent,’ Mark explains, ‘only don’t start relying on it.’
‘Why not?’
‘I wouldn’t bet on them staying. Jake sounded rightly pissed off on the phone. I don’t think he’s too thrilled about you.’
Anton’s hand reaches out and takes the money, puts it into his pocket. A quick surge of panic flashes through him – a new urgency.
‘Besides, I’m sure it’s in breach of your parole. You’ve got away with it for now, but … I don’t know. It’s probably not a good idea.’
Anton picks up his pint and takes a sip. The froth adheres to his lip. Years he has spent dreaming of this moment – decades – a pint of Guinness with his son. Such a simple thing to desire, but for Anton, it was an image freighted with hope. Now that the moment has arrived, it feels disappointing somehow. The murky gloom of the pub, the old man opposite struggling with his emphysema. Mark seems preoccupied, unhappy, and the beer tastes bitter.
‘You know, it might be an idea for you to think about selling the house,’ Mark suggests, interrupting his thoughts.
He’d wondered how long it would take for the conversation to come around to this.
‘It’s too big for one person. The upkeep alone … If you sold now, you’d have enough money to live on for the rest of your life.’
Encouraged by Anton’s silence, he leans forwards, warming to his subject. ‘I’ve been doing some browsing on property websites. Do you have any idea what a house like that could get?’ He lowers his voice, as if someone else might be listening. ‘One point two to one point five mil. That’s more than enough to set you up in a nice apartment with plenty of change to fund a long retirement.’
Anton puts down his pint. ‘Have you spoken to Sandy about this?’ he asks, and watches as Mark’s enthusiasm wanes, his face closing off.
‘Not really.’
‘Not interested in her old man, hmm?’ He’s shamelessly fishing, and it’s unfair of him to put his son on the spot about his sister. ‘Not that I blame her.’
She was always the tougher of the two, even though she was the younger. She stopped visiting him in prison when she was fourteen years old. Refused point blank. His letters to her came back unread. As soon as her education was finished, she took herself off to Australia with no plans to return. What little Anton knows of her life there, he has gleaned from conversations with Mark, who is reluctant at the best of times. There’s a boyfriend now, and there will in time be children – his grandchildren. But Anton knows he will never meet them. He knows he will never see Cassandra again. It comes to him in a rush – as it so often does – how that one night robbed him of everything. His wife, his children. The rumble of a hard anger starts in his gut.
‘That’s between you and Sandy, Dad. I’m not getting involved. Just tell me you’ll think about selling.’
Something about his son’s impatience, the way his features have sharpened with irritation, reminds Anton painfully of Charlotte.
‘Mark,’ he says quietly. ‘All that went on in our house. You were just a child. You couldn’t know. How could I possibly give it up?’
‘You’re right in that I was just a child, but there are still some things I remember about Mum, things I’d forgotten, but lately seem to be coming back.’
There’s a pointed manner to the way he says this, and Anton’s senses are heightened. He is made nervous by this territory. Danger lurks within these memories. He senses Mark’s wariness and knows that he, too, must tread carefully.
‘What sort of things?’ he asks.
‘I dunno. Little things. Like the way she used to put her make-up on. Remember that time I fell off the trampoline and split my knee open, and Mum called for an ambulance? I was talking to a friend about it recently, and I suddenly remembered Mum waiting for the ambulance to arrive and dabbing on face powder, spritzing perfume on her neck, and it came back to me how she used to call it giving herself “a quick going-over”.’
Anton smiles and nods. He remembers that, too.
‘The only time I’ve ever been in an ambulance,’ Mark says. ‘I can still recall the smell of it – ointment and plasters and Chanel No 5.’
Something hard now creeps into Mark’s tone. ‘You weren’t there that day,’ he tells Anton.
‘No. I was probably at work.’
Mark holds his gaze, his expression unreadable. ‘Why did Mum call an ambulance?’ he asks now. ‘Why didn’t she just put me and Sandy in the car and drive to A and E?’
His tone is brittle, and Anton doesn’t reply, suspecting that Mark already knows the answer.
‘She was drunk, wasn�
��t she?’
‘I don’t know, son. Perhaps.’
‘I remember her drinking. It’s another thing that’s come back to me. “Just a little tinkle,” she used to say to us, and then she’d splash white wine in a glass and take it out into the garden.’
He is half smiling at the memory but Anton gets the feeling that other emotions are just beneath the surface. Something about the manner of his reminiscence feels unsettling, like a dark force threatening to break through from beneath.
‘People talk about growing up with an alcoholic parent, how miserable and frightening it was for them, but that’s not how I remember it. She didn’t slug back vodka with grim determination while we sat festering in our own filth. She seemed perfectly happy. Was she, though?’ he asks Anton, a sharpness to the question. ‘Happy, I mean?’
‘Some of the time, son.’
‘But not always.’
‘None of us is happy all the time.’
‘But there must have been something more,’ he persists, ‘some deeper unhappiness that made her drink.’
Anton sips his pint, uncomfortable with Mark’s tone.
‘There’s something else I remember. Something about you,’ Mark tells him.
Anton puts his glass down, brings his eyes up to meet Mark’s, sees the hard, searching look his son gives him. Inwardly, he feels himself shying away from it, afraid.
‘I remember a party in the house. I remember going outside when I wasn’t supposed to. I saw something. I think I saw you.’
Anton’s heart is clamouring in his chest. He knows. The boy knows.
‘That was the night Mum died, wasn’t it?’
‘Mark, there were so many parties in our house. You were just a child –’
‘Why do you keep saying that?’
Mark’s eyes furiously search his father’s face. Finding nothing there, he lets them fall, then picks up his pint and sinks it. ‘I miss her,’ he admits. ‘Even now, I still do. I wish she hadn’t died, okay?’ he adds, and the hostility in his voice, with the accusatory look he shoots at Anton, changes things between them. For in that one moment, a realization comes to Anton, the truth he has always dreaded: his son thinks he did it.