That night they all took Beckham on his late walk again, and this time they were convinced they saw a fox’s brush whisking away round the hedge beside the presbytery.Next morning Matt rang the two schools in Pudsey the children attended, and said their mother was coming home after three months’ absence and he was taking them to meet her. When one school demurred he said they’d been very unsettled by her absence, he not being their father, and he felt it important they actually meet her on her homecoming—“so that the process of bonding can begin again,” he actually said, feeling a terrible phony. The school caved in immediately. They had more than enough problem children from broken relationships, and they felt obliged to be supportive where it seemed necessary.
They all packed into the car, including Beckham, who loved long journeys and controlled his urinary weakness remarkably well on them. Matt had always thought airports were hell on earth, and though many people said Manchester was several cuts above Heathrow or Gatwick, to Matt it was a pretty standard sort of hellhole. Still, they were able to take Beckham into the arrivals area, registered that Aileen’s plane was only half an hour delayed, and settled down to junk food and coffee. They were by the passageway leading out of customs at least half an hour before Aileen could reasonably have been expected to getthrough, surveying the streams of passengers as they emerged. Stephen even demanded of one lot whether they were off the Johannesburg plane, and had they seen his mother. His siblings pretended they weren’t with him.
And then there she was. Wheeling a single suitcase, as she had when she left, and with an old airline bag slung over her shoulder, she marched out into freedom looking so pleased, and tired, and excited, and desirable that Matt could hardly bear to let the children go first and jump up and kiss her, scream their ecstasy at seeing her again, take her case, push Beckham’s whiskery nose in her face, and generally forget all about Matt.
“Time’s up!” he announced commandingly, and folded Aileen into his arms in a long, long kiss and embrace that almost had him whimpering with pleasure and relief. And certainly when he held her at arm’s length to get a good look at her, her cheeks were blotchy, though she also looked wonderfully happy.
“Celebratory drink, or home?” he asked.
“Home. I’ve had enough of those damned little bottles,” Aileen said.
So it was back to the car, with Beckham in the luggage area this time, his old place, and a return to the motorway, through the gloom of Saddleworth moors, the spiritual backdrop to mass murder, then over the border into Yorkshire, with lots of singing, innumerable questions, and all too many bad jokes treasured up from the playground, then finally the horror of the Armley gyratory and home.
It occurred to Matt, as he got them all inside, that not one of their questions had been about their father.
He’d prepared a meal before they left, of lamb chops and fresh peas, that could be ready in half an hour at the touchof a few switches. At nine o’clock Stephen fell asleep on the sofa, and by half past the older children were unashamedly wilting too. When he and Aileen were alone Matt poured two glasses of wine, looked at her, and said, “You do like the house?”
“Love it. Matt?”
“Yes?”
“Do you want to get married? Somehow?”
“Don’t give a damn. We are married.”
“I love you so much.”
And then it was back together, the first time in what seemed an age, and endless pleasure and sleepiness. Matt had cunningly arranged two days free by swaps with colleagues, and when the children had been got off to school next day it was back to bed, more lovemaking, and then lots of talk. Most of it was about the children, but one little bit was about the dead baby. When Matt had brought Aileen up-to-date, she said, “I can tell from your voice that you’re not entirely satisfied. You want to believe what they told you, because you like them so much, but there’s something—I don’t know—something that doesn’t gel, isn’t there?”
“Yes. But I can’t pin down precisely what it is.”
Aileen lay there, considering.
“I’m not sure I can pin it down, but I see what you mean. I can understand all the stuff about poor Eddie Armitage. Feeling that he was responsible for the baby’s death was enough to send a boy already pretty unsure of himself over the edge. . . . Is it the conspiracy to protect Lily Marsden that doesn’t gel?”
“Not in itself, I don’t think. Peter was always by nature a protector. I used to feel that. If there was any chance ofLily being taken to court on a serious charge—at the least kidnapping Bella—then I think both he and Marjie would persuade the others to gang up to protect her.”
“Then is it his reluctance to give a name to her friend, even though it seems he and Marjie know it now?”
“No, it’s not that. You couldn’t accuse the friend without accusing Lily too, even if the influence he had would lessen her guilt—a strong personality twisting an under-aged and unhappy girl. You might just accuse Lily and keep the friend out of it, but you couldn’t do the reverse.”
“I suppose not. . . . It beats me. A collection of adults who don’t particularly like one another, who have had little or nothing to do with one another for thirty years, except this conspiracy to keep stum about the baby.”
“But that is a very important matter. Have you or I had anything remotely as important in our lives, let alone our young lives? It was potentially a murder or a manslaughter charge. I can see that, once the conspiracy was entered into, it was vital to keep it up.”
“There’s only one thing to do.”
“What’s that?”
“Go and talk to the younger Mr. Farson.”
“He’s all of sixty. But you’re right. That’s where the answers are. I’ve just got to get my mind around the right way to approach him, Charlie says.”
It was a week later—the happiest week of his life, Matt thought—that his car pulled up outside Carl Farson’s gate. He had been given the address in the correspondence over the purchase of Elderholm, but it had meant nothing to him. It was, he now saw, a house for people who didn’t bother about their house. It was one of a collection of boxes, probably built in the last five years, varying slightlyin size, offering the buyer a choice between a triangular arch or a flat slab over the front door, but otherwise a machine to live in, in the most soulless and dispiriting meaning of that phrase. Only the vicinity of Farnley Park gave the estate even the faintest semblance of desirability. The ridiculous thing was, these houses had probably not been cheap.
It was half past six. Carl Farson, the estate agent had told him, was manager of one of the branches of Freshfare, the supermarket chain. If he was on the evening roster Matt was out of luck, but there was a light on at the end of the hallway and when he rang he heard footsteps almost at once.
“Oh—it’s Mr. Harper, isn’t it?”
“Matt, please. Are you busy?”
“No, not at all. Just finished my meal—one of our own convenience foods, I’m afraid, with a convenience pudding to follow. I never learned to cook while I was married, and I’ve never bothered to learn since we split up. Come on through.”
Not interested in his home, not interested in his food. Matt wondered idly what button you would have to press to get from him commitment, involvement, enthusiasm. What sort of buff was he? Snooker, darts, the Masons, table-tapping, steam locomotives? He came into a room where a bit of minor untidiness was the only relief from the prevailing anonymity. The television was showing “Look North,” and Carl Farson reached to switch it off.
“You’re not on tonight, then?”
“I usually only do fill-ins,” said Matt. “Though there’s talk of something a bit more challenging.”
“I’ve not seen anything recently about this baby business,” said Farson, looking him in the eyes.
“No. There’s been nothing that could be broadcast. Really, we could only tell the full story if we had a trial and a conviction, and I don’t think that’s on the cards. But it’
s about that, that I’ve come.”
“I thought it might be. But I think you’ll be wasting your time. I know so little about those houses. . . .”
“I realize that. Just to fill you in: we think that the baby was taken from her father in Armley Park, taken back to Houghton Avenue, there was some kind of struggle over it between two of the children who lived in those houses, in the course of which it fell onto the stone balustrade at the front of Dell View and was killed instantly.”
“I see. . . . You’ve done good work.”
“The thing I’m interested in is why the child took the baby in the first place. It was just one of the group who did the snatch. It seems she had come under some very strong external influence. Let’s not beat about the bush: let’s say a malign influence.”
Carl Farson’s face was a mask of thought. By his side in the armchair his hands started clutching and unclutching themselves. He saw Matt noticing them, and stopped.
“And?”
“This particular child was visiting during the day a house off the Raynville Road on a regular basis. It was a matter of comment—smutty speculation—among the other children. The house was eight Leighton Terrace.”
“Yes.” Something like a sigh escaped him. “I suppose that would be the reason you’ve come.”
“Were you still living there at the time?” Matt asked.
He shook his head emphatically.
“No. I married when I was twenty-five. We were still pretty much in the lovebird stage in 1969, with a new baby. Sad . . .”
“And your father is, I suppose, beyond questioning now?”
“Oh, yes, mostly. Even on his best days you couldn’t get anything out of him about what happened in 1969. You might as well say 1469 or 69B.C.In any case, at that time, as I think I told you, my father was still working.”
Matt creased his brow.
“I think you did. But I don’t see your point.”
“My father did not work as a night watchman or a night manager in a hotel. Apart from weekends he was never there during the day.”
“And you were married—” A dim shaft of light shone in Matt’s brain. “Someone mentioned a daughter.”
“My sister, Nesta.” He shifted uneasily in his chair. “She died last year, so I can tell you about her. Even so, it’s not easy.”
“If she was the person who had this child under her influence, then I’d guess she wasn’t an easy person,” Matt said gently.
“She wasn’t. It’s funny, I always felt slightly scared of her, even though she was a year younger than me. Later on I tried to tell myself that it was jealousy, not fear: she got on, made something of herself, in a small way made a name. But it wasn’t that. Almost from the first it was uneasiness. She never wanted to inspire love in people—not in our dad, not even in our mam, who died when I was about fifteen. She preferred to arouse uneasiness, shading off into fear. You never knew where you were with Nesta. And shecame out with things that nobody else could ever have found words for: things about yourself, things about our background, how it held her back, locked her in. . . . She was bitter, she specialized in saying nasty things that you suspected might be true, but were better left unsaid. There was no doubt she was bright. With other bright kids you might say ‘bright as a button,’ but she wasn’t bright like that. She was sharp as a knife.”
Matt suspected that this was the key that had to be turned to unlock Carl Farson’s mind, the thing that had obsessed him, rankled with him, and had done all his childhood and throughout his adult life. His sister was a phenomenon he had wrestled with, tried to get to the bottom of. And probably failed.
“I can see she was rather an unnerving family member to have,” he said.
“She was terrifying at times,” Farson said abruptly. Then he swallowed. “Anyway, she got a place at a teachers’ college. She could have gone to university, but she said we couldn’t afford it. I think Father could have managed it, and there were grants then, but I think she wanted the shorter course and the independence it would give her earlier. She did psychology and PE, and came top of her year. I remember reading her references from college once, and was surprised at a certain lack of enthusiasm that seeped through, as though they were holding something back. But it didn’t stop her getting a good job as games mistress at a good private school near Harrogate.”
“And was there trouble there?”
“Not in the way I think you mean. Not that I knew of. She’d been there teaching for two years when she had a bad accident in the gym: she fell from a climbing rope, orrather it wasn’t properly secured and she fell with it and injured her spine very badly. She was in a wheelchair for the rest of her life.”
“I think I’m beginning to understand,” said Matt, getting a sense of a fiery, awkward, contradictory spirit horribly imprisoned.
“She got good compensation—good for that time, when they didn’t hand out small fortunes at the drop of a hat. It was handled by Morley-Coombs in Armley, and he was brilliant. There was no doubt it was part of the caretaker’s job to set up and maintain the gym equipment, not my sister’s. But there she was, back in a home she hated, spending day after day in the front room, watching people pass by, listening to the radio, doing the crossword in the paper. ‘Being banged up,’ she called it.”
“I can’t imagine the girl you have described really being content with that. There must have been escape routes.”
“There were, of a kind. She enrolled for an Open University course the moment it started up. The major component was philosophy. She did incredibly well, got special help, and eventually—but this was several years after the year you’re interested in—got a job with them. They put her in a special flat in Milton Keynes, with all the aids to independence you could think of, and she learned easily to do most things for herself. Yes, she made her escape.”
“But that left her emotional life unsatisfied.”
Carl Farson considered this.
“I think may be her emotional life was always going to be a problem, accident or no accident. There was talk when she was on the staff at Milton Keynes about an unhealthy influence on students, but it never came to anything, because of course they were all adults, and presumed to becapable of taking care of themselves. More serious, when this ‘political correctness’ idea came in, there were complaints that she was peddling obnoxious ideas in her lectures and seminars. They had some kind of inquiry or official hearing into those complaints.”
“I suppose this was notions of racial purity, was it? Eugenics, I think they used to call it.”
“That and other things. Denying the Holocaust, what she called the paralysis of democracy, sterilization of the unfit.”
“They all seem to point in a certain direction.”
“Yes. But Nesta argued that she threw around other arguments of a quite different political color, but they didn’t arouse the same ire in the ‘political correctness’ people. And Nesta was clever—she probably did. In any case her answer was that it was her business to test students’ responses to ideas, to float apparently outrageous theories in front of them, to stimulate their reactions and test their philosophical judgments. Students needed to know, she said, why notions that were perfectly acceptable in one generation could become intellectually beyond the pale in the next. I’m sorry if I’m not explaining this very well. I’m rather out of my depth.”
“Far from it. I think you must have heard her talking about it, didn’t you?”
“Only now and then. But when she did, I certainly remembered it. Nesta had a hold on me, you might say. She wasn’t a frequent visitor back home, as you might guess. Her physical condition made visits difficult unless she was fetched, but in the early days Dad could drive down and get her, or I could. It didn’t happen often. She wasn’t really interested. But by the way, if she did come up to Leeds, youcould be sure she’d go and visit Lily Fitch, as she had become.”
“I see. So we can be open about who we’re talking about.”
“I think she would,” Matt said. “Were you never with them when they were together, she and Lily? So that you could get an idea what the relationship depended on?”
“Never—only if I happened to be visiting, opening the door and showing Lily through to her, that kind of thing. . . . I did once listen.”
“Outside the door?”
“Window, actually. One summer much later on, in Elderholm. Those houses, though they’re attached, are very private, shielded—as of course you’d know. In any case Nesta could hardly run out and catch me at it, and Lily was just a visitor. Still, I felt pretty scared, I can tell you, just like when I was a boy.”
His voice faded into silence. Matt waited, but then had to prompt him.
“When was this?”
“Late seventies, I’d say. When she was back on one of her rare visits from Milton Keynes, and Lily was a mother, with a child just starting school. They were talking about the things you’ve mentioned, and it was almost as if Nesta was giving her a sort of refresher course. She always had a lot of the teacher in her—or preacher, you might say, preacher of a particularly twisted kind. I heard her say: ‘In the long term sterilization is probably the answer. In the short term, it has to be human extermination.’ My blood ran cold. It brought back all those terrible pictures of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. . . .”
The Bones in the Attic Page 19