He did call her. She was just through the door of her flat, kicking off her shoes, desperate to sleep but so far beyond herself she did not think she could. Her head was full of the night gone past. When the phone started ringing she stared at it, dazed. Then with a jolt she dived across the room, snatching up the receiver.
‘It’s me,’ he said as those we love and live with do say, knowing they will be recognised from two syllables.
‘Hello. Hello. Are you all right?’
‘Yes. Are you?’
‘I’m just off nights. I’m a bit – never mind – I’m glad you called me.’
Her legs were aching, burning, so she caught a stool with her foot and dragged it close to the phone so that she could sit down.
‘Do you need to get to bed? I can call later.’
‘Yes, but it’s all right. Will we – when will we meet?’
‘I’ll come to Edinburgh if you like,’ he offered. ‘When will you have had enough sleep?’
‘Never, at this rate. But it’s fine – I just won’t be fit to speak until really late tonight.’
‘Tomorrow then,’ he said. ‘I have two days off, so – ’
‘Oh that’s good, so have I, come tomorrow, come to Edinburgh. I’d like that.’
He sounded different, better, this time. Perhaps, after all, everything would get back to normal. A different normal, but she accepted that, and was hopeful as she lay in her darkened bedroom, listening to the traffic in the street taking other people to their ordinary lives, and drifted at last into sleep.
The exigencies of their jobs, utterly different and yet with similarly antisocial hours, meant they could not establish any kind of routine. They did however meet as often as possible. The train journey between Glasgow and Edinburgh became familiar, though she often dozed for part of it, never quite catching up on sleep.
He took her to his flat and she met the two students he shared with. Daniel’s room, and the part of the kitchen where he kept his things, were sparely furnished and immaculate. The rest of the flat was chaos, but Caroline found it endearingly comfortable. There was no threat to Daniel or her from these thin boys in jeans and tee shirts, eating bad food and leaving piles of dirty clothes and empty mugs and plates everywhere. Joe was an art student whose main study was photography. ‘Good,’ he said when he was introduced to Caroline, ‘brilliant, can I get you both together, right? Twins, yeah? Magnifique.’ Kenny, who was often irritated by Joe being arty, raised his eyes heavenwards. ‘He’s a maniac with that camera,’ he said. ‘Nobody’s safe. He keeps taking shots of the fucking door. Sorry, Daniel’s Sister. Boring door.’ He grinned.
‘It’s a supercalifragilistic door, you moron,’ Joe said. ‘Go on, can I?’
He made them stand outside the main door of the flats, a door with peeling paint and one of its numbers askew – the 2 of 102 leaning sideways, a nail missing. He photographed Daniel first, then pushed the door half open. ‘Now stand behind him, right, yeah, that’s it.’ Behind her, Kenny said something and laughed, and she half turned, missed the first one, was too far back or something. They did it again, but they were all laughing, and Joe gave up. ‘Hopeless,’ he said. ‘I want moody and mysterious. Not hysterical.’
A few days later, he was attaching his bicycle to the railing with its chain lock when they came out, Daniel first, Caroline a few seconds after. Joe dragged his camera out of his bag with rough haste, calling ‘Wait!’ and caught them, unwary and unready, Caroline still in the shadow of the doorway.
‘They make me laugh,’ she said to Daniel afterwards.
‘Me too,’ he said, and smiled.
In Edinburgh, her own flat seemed still and empty in contrast, her life quiet. Daniel said he liked her place, but she could not persuade him to look for a job in Edinburgh. He was more cheerful, but she felt she had to treat him like an invalid who must be allowed to have his way, at least for a while. She had raised the matter of telling the rest of the family. They were having coffee inside the Italian café because it was a chilly June day with an Edinburgh East wind.
‘I haven’t told anyone yet, but I can’t keep on not telling them.’
‘Right.’
‘Will I call Janet or Granny?’
Daniel stirred brown sugar into his coffee, watching the crystals dissolve in the foam. ‘It’s up to you.’
‘You don’t want me to?’
‘I should call them myself. I will.’
‘Right. So when – ’
‘Soon.’
‘Do you promise?’
‘Promise.’
After a moment he said, ‘I won’t disappear again, I won’t do that.’
Relief flooded through her, but all she said was, ‘Good.’ Then, remembering, making light of it, she said, ‘At least they noticed you’d gone. You know that time when you all left the theatre without me? I still can’t believe we were right and it was only Esther tried to tell them.’
Daniel smiled. ‘Yeah, the disappearing twins. Best we don’t do it together.’
She wondered why not; the idea, all at once, appealed. ‘It’s awful being the one left behind.’
‘I know.’
‘I came back next day!’
‘Did you ever tell them where you were?’
‘Told them the truth – I stayed with a friend.’
It had not been the plan. They had withdrawn themselves quietly from the crowd to stand talking in the foyer.
‘He wouldn’t notice we’d gone, I bet, for days,’ Caroline had said. ‘The only person he pays attention to is her.’
This wasn’t new, and it was just as true for Margaret, Daniel pointed out.
‘One of us,’ Caroline said, ‘could just disappear – tonight – and I bet you a tenner they wouldn’t notice at least until tomorrow.’
‘I won’t bet,’ Daniel said, ‘because I suspect you’re right.’
It had to be her; he was the only boy, and more noticeable, after all.
‘Where will you go?’
She had wondered if she might just walk out of the theatre, down Union Terrace, and head for the country bus. She would go to Braeside. Stay there till her grandparents came home next day.
‘Eddie’s there, though, isn’t he?’
‘As if Eddie would bother. He only thinks about the beasts. He’ll be in bed, up early for milking.’
She had simply disappeared into the Ladies as the rest of the family put on their coats, ready to go home. They would look for her here, if anyone asked where she was, or counted them all back into the cars.
No one did.
She waited half an hour, to be sure, with increasing indignation at being proved right.
On Union Terrace, the idea of going all the way to Braeside lost its appeal. She thought she might just go back to Harry and Janet’s after all, getting a taxi after the last bus had gone, to give them a fright at least. She did not believe they would all go to bed without realising she was not there. But Daniel had promised to say nothing, to wait and see.
At the next bus stop was a student she knew, not a medic, someone she had come across at parties, with other people. She knew he liked her.
‘Come to the folk club?’ he asked. So she went. The session was all but over by the time they got there; she ended up sleeping on the sofa in his student flat.
‘It was very strange, being in hiding. It felt like that,’ she told Daniel now.
‘I took the easy way out,’ he said. ‘Went overseas.’
‘Tell me about it,’ she said. Hesitant, he began, but for all he told her, she knew there was more. How much time, she wondered, did they have? She was uneasy about keeping so much from their family and beginning to feel like a liar.
Janet wrote to her every week, Granny once a month, both of them letters with news that often made her miserable with longing for home when she was alone and struggling with work. Now she felt her replies – always brief – had become deceptive. Not knowing her hours of work, they did not telephon
e; Granny distrusted the instrument and had never acquired the facility to talk on it for more than a moment. It was easy to deceive them.
When she told Daniel about the letters, he wanted to read them.
‘I’ve got every single one,’ Caroline said. ‘You can read them all.’
He looked in astonishment at the shoebox she handed him. ‘There are hundreds!’
‘Almost two years of letters, coming weekly. I’ve been home of course, Christmas and some holiday, but still, there are a lot. If a postcard had come from you, she put that in with them. I could tell by the stiffness of the envelope, if there had been one that week.’ She paused, remembering the lurch of disappointment when she knew there was nothing enclosed. Janet had not commented, had written only, ‘I’m enclosing Daniel’s pc, or something like ‘We can’t make out the postmark, but it’s the Acropolis so he must be in Athens.’
In the pause, Daniel said, ‘Sorry,’ and their eyes met.
Caroline put her hand on the box. ‘There’s nothing exciting in the letters, I hope you don’t expect literature – it’s just the day to day stuff. Granny tells me if the hens aren’t laying, and what the weather’s like and quite a lot about people’s illnesses and operations. All her friends are old now, like her.’
‘Is she all right? She must miss Grandpa.’
‘Of course she does. And – ’ She had been about to say and you but stopped, biting her lip.
‘Let me read the letters, then – ’
‘Then what? You’ll get in touch, let them know you’re all right? That’s what they want, that’s all that matters.’
Gianni’s little café was an easy place for them to sit and talk, part way between Caroline’s flat and Waverley Station. They liked it and Gianni saw them as old friends, persuading them to have minestrone at lunchtime, adding extra garlic bread without putting it on the bill. Before Daniel went for his train, Caroline taped up the shoebox and they stopped at the café for their last coffee together for nearly two weeks. Their hours did not match and Caroline anyway had an exam coming up. She could manage the weeks without seeing him, now she had stopped being afraid he would vanish.
‘You’ve been so good to me, Caro,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t blame you if you went ahead and called Janet. But they won’t be like you – they’ll want all the details, a real explanation. Where I’ve been, what I’ve been doing, why I didn’t get in touch.’
‘I want to know all that too.’
‘Yes, but – well, I guess you’ve changed too. You’d have nagged me to death a few years ago.’
‘Maybe. A few years ago you wouldn’t have gone off on your own, given up medicine, your career, your vocation. Your whole life.’
A flash of pain sharpened his face and his cup went down with a clatter. ‘I know.’
‘Well – ’
‘Look – ’ He turned to her at last. ‘I will tell you, I’ll tell you all about it. Next time we meet. I need to read these letters first, I need to think myself back to the guy I was then, the boy. That life. Being us, at Braeside.’ He paused. ‘What about Dad?’
‘He’s always known it’s me you were most likely to contact. He’s still in London, but he’s talking about moving back to Scotland. I think he’s had an offer from an oil company now that there’s so much going on with North Sea oil in Aberdeen.’
‘So I should contact him.’ Caroline did not answer. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘I will.’
They sat in silence for a moment. Then Caroline said, ‘Did you use much of your money? Travelling around.’
‘What do you mean? I stayed in hostels and stuff, slept on people’s floors. Did temporary jobs in hotels, on farms, in a vineyard once. I didn’t spend all that much.’
‘So you’ve still got some left – of our mother’s money.’
‘Oh – that money.’ He seemed suddenly to realise what she meant. ‘Never touched it. Not a penny after – afterwards. If you subtract the cost of the car and what we spent on the flat, the rest is still there in my savings account, and whatever that investment was Harry sorted for us.’
‘So you could buy a flat or something. That’s where mine has gone. Harry thought it was the best thing to do. He says property always rises in value.’
Daniel smiled. ‘Harry would. No, I don’t want to use the money for that.’
‘What then?’
‘I don’t know that I feel entitled to it.’ At Caroline’s flush of resentment, he added hastily, ‘I think you did the right thing – you need a place of your own, working the way you do. It’s me – I don’t think I can . . . what’s the expression? I don’t feel I can lay claim to that money. Not for myself, not yet.’
Caroline sighed. ‘Oh, Daniel.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘We’d better go if you’re planning to get the four-thirty.’
He put a hand on her arm, keeping her in her seat.
‘After the accident – how could I be a doctor? Doctors are supposed to have integrity. They preserve life, they take responsibility. I didn’t do that, I was careless.’
‘But so was I. Still, it was an accident. I don’t feel guilty about that any more. It wasn’t our fault.’ She knew she sounded as if she were pleading and that he still did not believe it.
‘I decided to put myself out of the picture, as far as anything medical was concerned,’ Daniel went on. ‘I know we don’t believe in God, any of that, but when something you do leads to a terrible thing happening to someone else, you have to make up for it in some way.’
‘Atonement,’ she said, thinking of herself.
‘Well, yes. When I thought about it, the money seemed to be part of the guilt I felt. I used that money to buy the car.’
‘So my atonement is to be a doctor, and yours is to work as a kitchen porter?’
‘That’s just to keep body and soul more or less together. Though there were times I thought they might be better apart.’
‘No!’
‘Don’t worry. I haven’t the right to take another life, even my own.’
‘It’s crazy. You should be using the brains you’ve got, making the most of your life.’
‘Like you.’
‘You know it wasn’t my choice. I wanted to come with you.’
‘But it has worked out all right?’ Now he was pleading.
She was silent for a moment. ‘I had to let you go away. I owed you that much.’
He sighed. ‘You made it possible. And though – though it might not look like it right now – that was the right thing for me. I’m grateful to you. I just want to know that – in the long run – it was the right thing for you.’
She shrugged, not answering that. ‘We’re quits, then?’
‘Oh yes, we’re quits.’ He put his hand on her arm. ‘You’ve worked bloody hard, I can see that.’
Caroline put her hand over his and they sat in silence for a moment till she glanced at her watch, knowing he did not wear one, neither Gordon’s nor any other. Fleetingly, she thought of her ring, left at Braeside nearly three years ago. ‘We have to go.’
‘There’s something I should tell you, before we do.’
Panic swept her off kilter – what?
‘I can get the five-fifteen, that will do.’
‘What is it? You’re not going away again – please say you’re not doing that.’
He squeezed her hands between his. ‘No, of course not, no. Don’t cry.’
‘I’m not.’ She fumbled for a tissue and blew her nose. Then, tucking it away, she put her hands in his again, wanting the reassurance of touch, of knowing he really was still here. ‘What is it, then?’
‘It’s about Margaret,’ he said.
‘She’s all right. She was ill a lot – the way she was as a little girl, with mysterious fevers – but – ’ She stopped. He wanted to tell her something about Margaret, not to ask. What could he know, that she did not?
‘It was Janet. Before I went, long before. Just after Diana died she asked me about blood groups.’
/>
‘Janet asked you about blood groups. Why?’
‘Parents and children. She asked about blood groups of parents and children.’
‘Oh God.’
‘I guessed it was to do with Diana.’
Fleetingly, they tried to conjure Diana, but all that seemed so long ago, and she had become unreal to them.
‘Diana? Had Dad said something to Janet? Or was it Diana herself?’
‘I don’t know. Janet didn’t say, but she’d just come back from seeing Diana in London, before she died.’
‘You never told me any of this!’
‘Hush.’ He glanced round, since she had raised her voice, but nobody was paying any attention. ‘It wasn’t my secret to tell.’
‘You kept this secret from me.’
‘I’m sorry, I don’t even know if there was a secret. I didn’t think anything about it at the time, really. It was only later, when I was going away and I was thinking about Margaret, leaving her behind.’
‘You were leaving me behind without a backward glance!’
‘Hardly!’
‘Well?’
Something changed in the air around them, a mist lifted, and Caroline saw him as if for the first time since he had gone. Here he was, Daniel, straight, without the layers of mystery he had seemed to accumulate in his absence.
He smiled, putting his hand over hers, twisting with fury in her lap. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Don’t be cross with me. I relied on you to be ok, but I felt guilty about Margaret. Then I thought it doesn’t make any difference, what Diana might have said when she was dying. If that was it. Margaret’s still Tilly, still our sister, isn’t she?’
Caroline, not answering this, thought, maybe not. With a sigh, she opened her hands and held his, warm between them. ‘I’m not cross,’ she said. ‘At least, no more than usual.’ She smiled back at him.
‘I’m telling you now,’ he said, ‘because . . . well, because I’m back.’
Within the space of this strange conversation, Caroline realised she had stopped feeling afraid. I’ve been rigid with fear since he came back, she thought. And now I’m not.
The Treacle Well Page 15