by Pat Barker
She took a long deep breath. Her father wanted to bring the car to her, but she wasn’t having that. She wasn’t ready to be left on her own, not even in this public place with people coming and going, so they walked across the car park together. A long way.
Just as they got to the car her mobile rang. Stephen. It was the first time he’d been able to reach her because inside the hospital you had to keep your mobile switched off.
‘Where are you?’ he asked.
‘On my way home. Where are you?’
‘Stuck here. I can’t leave till the glazier’s been.’
‘Has Robert rung?’
‘Yes – they’ll be back in an hour.’
‘Will you come round to the vicarage?’
‘Yes.’
‘Don’t forget Adam. He’s gets panicky if you’re late.’
So many details, she thought. Probably just as well, probably that’s what helped people keep their heads together, collecting a child from school, giving him his tea. She rang off. Her father was looking at her.
‘Stephen,’ she said.
‘I thought it was.’
It was a big moment, that. Acknowledging Stephen’s claim. His right to ring.
Robert and Beth arrived home earlier than Stephen had expected, only a few minutes after he spoke to Justine.
He saw them walking up the path, Beth trundling their weekend bag, Robert striding ahead, grim-faced, and went to the door to meet them.
Robert touched his shoulder, and brushed past him into the living room, where he scanned the vacant spaces, then puffing his mouth out with relief said, ‘Oh, well, it’s not too bad. What about upstairs?’
‘I don’t think they had time.’
Beth went upstairs to check on her jewellery, and came down saying there were one or two things missing, but only pieces she’d left lying on top of the dressing table. Anything valuable she kept in a shoebox in the wardrobe. It wouldn’t have taken them long to find that, Stephen thought, but then he remembered they hadn’t found the key under the urn.
She sat down heavily on the sofa, staring round her like somebody unsure of her welcome in a stranger’s house. ‘It’s the shock,’ she said, ‘more than anything.’
‘The police want a list of what’s missing, as soon as you can. I couldn’t remember.’
‘I’m not sure I can.’ She was staring blankly at the empty mantelpiece.
‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ Stephen said.
Robert followed him into the kitchen.
‘Justine seems to be all right,’ Stephen said, with a slight edge.
‘I know. Beth rang Angela from the airport.’ He sat down at the table, looking round at the thickly clustering fingerprints. ‘God, what a mess.’
Stephen looked round too, at a patch of dried blood on the work surface near the sink. The air seemed to hold a suspension of fear and pain.
Robert asked, ‘How did they get in?’
‘Utility-room window. The glazier’s coming round to fix it.’ A pause. ‘The alarm wasn’t on. That’s my fault, not Justine’s. I was the last out.’
Robert shrugged. ‘I don’t suppose it would have made much difference. It’s connected to a security firm, but they’re forty minutes’ drive away. You can clear a house in half that time.’
‘Beth seems very calm. I thought she’d be more upset.’
‘Shock.’
Stephen didn’t think it was shock. ‘This is your incident number,’ he said, handing over the slip of paper. ‘And now, if you don’t mind, I think I’ll leave you to it, unless you want me to collect Adam?’
‘Would you mind?’ Beth said.
‘No, of course I –’
‘It’s just I don’t think I can rest until I’ve got things straight again.’
Robert followed him to the door and out on to the path.
‘I’m sorry, Robert.’
‘Not your fault. We’ve all been careless. It could just as well have happened another day when I hadn’t set the alarm.’
A brief embrace, and Stephen was walking down the path to his car, thinking how much he liked his brother. That was new. And Beth’s toughness – he’d started to sense that quality in her, but the last few minutes had confirmed it.
He glanced at his watch. He’d be in time for Adam, though only just.
Children were spilling out into the playground as he parked the car and opened the window. A knot of people, mainly women, were waiting outside the gates, some of them – he realized as the first children arrived – collecting children of ten or eleven. He and Robert had been walking home alone by the time they were eight. Where children were concerned, everything had changed, and not, he thought, for the better. The kids were red-faced, running, shouting, waving pictures, all over the place. If you saw an adult moving like this, you’d know they had St Vitus’s dance. C’mon, Adam. He was tapping the flat of his hands on the dashboard, tempted to ring Justine’s mobile again. But she might have gone to sleep.
At last Adam appeared, also carrying a painting, but walking along at a sedate, professorial pace, and alone. He didn’t show any surprise when he saw Stephen, though, as he climbed into the back seat, he asked, ‘Are Mum and Dad back?’
‘Yes. They’re at home.’
He looked in the rear-view mirror at Adam’s round unhappy face. ‘How was it?’
‘Bloody awful.’
‘It doesn’t last for ever.’
But the trouble is, he thought, waiting for a gap in the traffic, it does – virtually – at that age. We daren’t let ourselves imagine children’s lives. Anybody as trapped in a job as they are in school would go mad. He wondered if he should tell Adam about the burglary, and decided it might be as well to warn him. Adam listened, but showed no particular concern. ‘One of them hit Justine, so she won’t be looking after you tomorrow.’
‘Does that mean I won’t have to go to school?’
Egotism was natural in children, but he found it slightly surprising when Adam made no further reference to Justine, though he did ask if they’d stolen his Playstation and whether he would still be able to fly Archie on Friday after school.
‘Justine’s back home now,’ Stephen said. ‘She had to go to hospital to get some stitches put in, but then the doctor said she could go home.’
No comment. Stephen gave up, though he was beginning to think it quite odd. Back at the house, he said, ‘I won’t come in. But don’t worry, Mum’s –’
Adam was already out of the car. At the last moment he thrust his painting into Stephen’s hands. ‘Give her this.’
Stephen looked down. It was the scene every child paints: a house with a smoking chimney, curtains at the windows, a tree in the garden, Mum, Dad, child, dog standing on the lawn, and behind them all, filling the whole sky, an enormous, round, golden sun.
He’d never been to the vicarage, never seen it except on the one occasion when Beth had asked him to drive Justine home from work. Then it had been too dark to see clearly, though he’d had the impression of a large gloomy house set back from the road behind tall trees.
Why not cut them down? he wondered, as he parked the car. They must make the front rooms intolerably dark, but then some people can’t bring themselves to cut down any tree, however ancient or badly positioned. A pair of wood pigeons broke cover as he walked up the drive, startling him with the clap of their wings. He rang the bell, heard it clang deep inside the house, and stood there waiting, feeling a fool with his bunch of daffodils.
Alec opened the door. Angela stood behind him, peering over his shoulder. He thought for a moment they might not let him in, but then Alec stood to one side. Stephen had stopped the burglars doing whatever they were thinking of doing next. Which was probably to run away, but you could never be sure. People with limited intelligence and low impulse control come up with some pretty disastrous solutions to problems. Alec had known a great many such people, presumably, over the years, and he could have no illusions about the danger Ju
stine had been in.
‘She’s in bed,’ Angela said.
‘They gave her a sedative,’ Alec said. ‘She’s very drowsy.’
‘I won’t stay long. I just want to give her these.’
They stood together in the hall, reflected, all three of them, in a small bevelled mirror on the wall.
Justine’s voice from upstairs called, ‘Stephen?’
‘Coming.’
They parted in front of him, and he went up the stairs which had a threadbare strip of carpet in the centre of the treads held in place by stair-rods. He’d thought stair-rods were a thing of the past, along with floral pinnies and stottie cakes and bombers’ moons. Apparently not.
Justine’s bedroom was huge. Angela followed him in and hovered as he walked across the floor to the bed, which was small and single, lost in the vast space. Two tall uncurtained windows let in a fretwork of shadows, moving and shifting perpetually, as a breeze, not perceptible at ground level, ruffled the leaves.
He got a chair and sat down by the bed, wanting to kiss her, but aware of Angela behind him. Aware too that most of Justine’s face looked as if a kiss would hurt. Her nose was in plaster. It looked rather like Norman armour and, incredibly, suited her, bringing out something in her that he’d only dimly sensed before. The skin round her eyes was beginning to turn black. She had two bald patches in her hair, each with a ridge of suture lines like black spiky caterpillars crawling across her white skin.
He put the daffodils and Adam’s painting down on the bedspread. ‘How are you?’
‘Not bad.’
She had some colour in her cheeks, but her eyes flickered round the room in a way he didn’t like.
Alec was in the doorway too now.
‘Angela, do you think you could put these in water?’ Justine asked sweetly, picking up the daffodils that had left a small damp patch on the white cotton.
They took it as a hint to leave. He bent down and kissed her on the forehead and they stayed like that, hearing each other breathe, not wanting to move, but then she sat back, raised her knees, and smiled. She was wearing a white nightshirt with a Snoopy design and looked every day of fifteen. His sympathies at that moment were all with Alec. I’d throw me out, he thought.
‘How are you really?’
‘Not good. Angela’s driving me mad. “Poor motherless child.”’
‘Have you spoken to your mother?’
‘No, we don’t know where she is. I’m OK. Or I will be when I can get up and about. I wish I hadn’t taken that bloody sedative.’
‘It might be a good idea to get some sleep.’
‘Not if it means waking up at three o’clock in the morning.’
‘Have you got some painkillers?’
‘Oh, yeah. Real knock-out stuff.’ She held up a bottle of pink pills from the table beside the bed. ‘I want to get up.’
‘Better not. You’ve had a shock.’
‘So have you.’
He shrugged. ‘Oh, I’m bomb happy.’
‘What were you going to do with that statue?’
‘Kill him.’
‘You’d have got five years.’
‘Not if they’d seen a photograph of you.’
‘Oh, well. It didn’t happen.’
She touched her scalp, prodding the line of stitches as he suspected she did twenty times an hour. ‘You must have lost quite a bit of blood.’
‘It looked a lot. I’m not sure it was.’ A pause while she prodded her scalp again. ‘How’s Beth taking it?’
‘Quite well. Tough as an old boot.’
‘She’s going to need to be, because I don’t think I can go back.’
‘No, I don’t think you should.’
‘It scuppers her completely.’
‘That’s her problem.’
‘Perhaps I could have Adam here.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, if it comes to that, I’ll mind him. What you should think about is going away for a holiday in the sun.’
‘Who with?’
‘Me, of course.’
‘What about the book?’
‘Fuck the book.’
‘I’ve never heard you say that before.’
‘Then you haven’t been listening, because I say that at least once a day.’
Angela came in with the daffodils in a vase and put it down on the table. ‘Have you taken your pill, Justine?’
‘Not yet. I will.’
‘You need a good night’s sleep.’
‘I’ll take it at bedtime.’
Angela withdrew.
‘Can’t you go downstairs and watch television?’
She shook her head. ‘I wish I could go out.’
‘Tomorrow.’
He was looking round the room, thinking how much of a young girl’s room it was. Posters, photographs, make-up, a red rosette pinned up on a cork board, the relic of some pony-club triumph of the past. Her shoes were lined up neatly in one corner next to the dressing table.
‘Do you think we could go somewhere?’ she asked.
‘Anywhere you like. If you’re sure you’ll be well enough?’
‘I don’t see why not. It’s a broken nose, for heaven’s sake, not a broken neck.’
‘All right. Where would you like to go?’
‘Don’t know.’
He touched her leg through the bedspread. ‘You be thinking about it. I’ll come and get you about ten.’
He thought, as he went downstairs and was let out of the house by Angela – Alec seemed to be avoiding him – that it had been an extraordinary day. We live our whole lives one step away from clarity, he thought. That moment, careering down the steep hillside, knowing that however hard he ran he wouldn’t get there in time, had taught him more about his feelings for Justine than months of introspection could have done. All along in the back of his mind he’d been aware of his priorities in life rearranging themselves without any conscious effort on his part. You thought you cared about that? Don’t be silly. The girl. She’s what matters.
Poor Justine. What a helluva year she’d had – breaking up with Peter, glandular fever, the disappointment over not going to Cambridge – and now this. But she was strong. She’d come through it. Changed, though. And the changed Justine might have no use for him.
Twenty-six
Left alone, Justine lay for a time quietly watching the play of shadows on the bedspread. Then, just as she decided to get out of bed and go downstairs, she drifted off to sleep. She dreamt she was far out, a long way from land on a frozen lake. She’d been walking for hours, her boots squeaking on the ice, a cold wind flattening her skirt against the backs of her legs. Probably she ought to stop and turn back towards the line of lights behind her, but when she turns round the wind slashes tears from her eyes. Her face is burning. Don’t look, a voice whispers in her mind. Don’t turn round. She’s too far out already. It’s dark now and getting colder by the minute. Stop. Turn. Look down. The ice at her feet is thick and marbled, like frozen phlegm. It had borne her weight while she was walking away from the shore, but when she tries to go back it starts to creak alarmingly. She feels rather than hears the sound, a protest, almost a groan. Down there beneath her feet is icy water a mile deep. She tries to set off at another angle and again the ice creaks. It comes to her that there’s only one path back to the shore, and that she doesn’t know where it is. Ahead there is only the trackless waste of ice, catching a dull gleam from the stars.
She woke up, shivering, instantly alert. A glance at her watch told her she’d been asleep less than twenty minutes, though she felt as if she’d been walking across the ice all night. The fear of the dream was still on her. She snuggled down under the covers, reassuring herself that she was warm and dry. Safe at home.
Slowly her thoughts ranged back over the day. Even this brief interlude of sleep had given her a sense of distance from the attack. The interview with the detectives in the hospital kept coming back to her. ‘Your father,’ they said at one point. A few m
inutes later, they were talking about ‘your attacker’. My attacker? she’d wanted to say. But he’s nothing to do with me.
It still worried her. ‘Your’ attacker seemed to imply a continuing relationship. If she’d tripped on a kerb and broken her nose, nobody would have been talking about ‘your’ kerb. They were such harmless little words: ‘your’, ‘my’, but they opened the door on to a small dark room, a space so cramped it could hold only two people, herself and her attacker. Don’t look. Don’t turn round. She sat up and looked, slowly and carefully, at every object in the room, turned, and did the same for the wall behind her. She wasn’t going to let the attack define her. Who are you? I’m a woman who got beaten up by a burglar. Oh, no. There was quite a bit more to her than that.
Dad came upstairs and sat with her. He looked so lost and helpless sitting there, she started to feel responsible for him. ‘Where’s Angela?’
‘Gone home. She thought we’d like some time together.’
‘That was nice of her. I am pleased, you know. About…’
He nodded. ‘It might mean leaving the parish.’
‘Because you’re divorced?’
‘Yes.’
‘Perhaps it’s time to move on anyway.’
‘Yes. I’ll miss it, though.’
‘Yeah, me too.’
They sat in silence for a while. She wanted to get up and have a bath, but she knew he needed to sit there, keeping guard over his little girl. Only I’m not his little girl, she thought.
‘Dad, do you think I could have a lock on my door?’
‘Yes, of course.’ He brightened at once. It was something for him to do. ‘I’ll put one on tomorrow. Unless you’d rather I got one now?’
‘No, tomorrow’s fine.’ She didn’t want to be left in the house on her own. She’d have to face it sooner or later, but not yet. ‘Stephen’s taking me out tomorrow.’
He thought for a moment, then nodded. ‘Good.’
She got up, had a bath, intending to get dressed after it and resume normal life, but the hot water knocked her out. She was barely able to crawl back upstairs and into bed. I’m just resting, she told herself, but fell asleep immediately and slept for two hours, dreamlessly this time.