by Abigail Dean
A slight shake of her head.
‘Hey,’ she said, ‘do you have any coffee?’
On the phone, the overnight receptionist was bemused. ‘Didn’t they arrive?’ he asked.
‘They arrived,’ I said. ‘Two more.’
‘You must be having a difficult night, Miss Gracie.’
‘Yes. That’s true. Thank you.’
Delilah was appraising the room. She opened the wardrobe and ran her index finger along the dresses and suits. She took the complimentary body lotion from the side of the bath and squeezed it into her palm. At the desk, she read the note of consent and waited for me to hang up the phone.
‘A community centre,’ she said.
‘There are two assets,’ I said. ‘The house at Moor Woods Road, and twenty thousand pounds—’
‘Alexandra Gracie,’ she said. ‘Philanthropist.’
‘Are you happy with it or not?’
‘It was our home,’ she said, ‘and I’ll be glad to see it used for such a good cause.’
She had retained her small, self-satisfied smile.
‘The money’s more interesting,’ she said. ‘Not least – where did it come from?’
This development, I enjoyed. Bill had emailed over the documentation when I was on the train back to London, and had phoned me right away. The money was attributed to the sale of a handful of shares in a technology corporation, he said, which Father had purchased decades before. ‘If he had bought a couple of hundred,’ Bill said, ‘you’d be millionaires by now.’
A success, after all of this time. He would probably have declared himself the last major prophet. ‘It’s the pioneers who get slaughtered,’ I said to Bill.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘No. Nothing.’
‘The money,’ Delilah said, ‘should be divided between us.’
‘The way I see it,’ I said, ‘is that the house is pretty worthless without some money to transform it. The council will want to see that we’re committed – that we’re willing to make a personal investment.’
‘It’s not for me,’ she said. ‘Although I know that’s what you expect. I’m married now, Lex. He’s a good man – an important man. But he’s specific about his causes. And this – it’s for a cause which is close to both of our hearts. But not to his.’
Ethan had found the wedding announcement on the Telegraph website. Delilah’s husband was the heir to Pizza Serata, a chain of pizzerias marching north from Maidenhead. The marriage had taken place quietly, on a Friday afternoon. All I knew about Pizza Serata was that they had been exposed as donating to anti-abortion charities across the Atlantic, and that the pizzas were mediocre.
Delilah lay down on the bed and rested an arm over her eyes.
‘How to explain,’ she said. ‘We were a family. Weren’t we? At Moor Woods Road. Mother and Father – they tried to protect us. And there are consequences – aren’t there? – to tearing a family apart? Removing that protection. Some people learn to live with it. But others don’t.’
The coffees arrived. They were delivered by a new waiter in a clean, crisp uniform. A visitor from the land of the living. Delilah threw him a smile. ‘You’ve saved my life!’ she said.
The coffee was too hot to drink. We sat for a moment, cradling the cups and saucers. Delilah’s hair fell around her face.
‘Even me,’ Delilah said. ‘I struggled, at first. Alone for the first time, somewhere unfamiliar, and without our family. Mother out of bounds, and what happened to Father. There were things which I questioned, too. But God waited for me.’
She was convincing, Delilah. If you spent long enough listening to her, you could appreciate how she had convinced herself.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘What do you need it for – the money?’
‘It’s Gabriel,’ she said. ‘He isn’t well.’
‘Where is he?’
‘Not so fast. You don’t get to start caring now.’
She held her coffee to her chest, like something she wasn’t willing to share.
‘He’s in a hospital,’ she said. ‘A private hospital. He came to me out of desperation, I think. He knew that I would help him. And he’s doing OK. I had enough money for the first month or so. You know that I won’t beg you, Lex. But you need to understand that I care for him. And you have to accept responsibility – for what you changed.’
My brain was heavy, laden with last night’s rust, but it was starting to grind.
‘You didn’t even know about the inheritance until today,’ I said. ‘So what was going to happen then?’
Delilah combed back her hair. Behind it, she wore her little smile. ‘God loves a cheerful giver,’ she said.
‘You had already decided to ask me for money,’ I said. ‘Hadn’t you?’
‘Why else would I be here? It’s an added convenience, I suppose, that now there’s something you actually owe me.’
And Ethan wouldn’t have helped Gabriel. A few weeks after he became the headteacher at Wesley, after the articles and the interviews, somebody broke into the house in Oxford in the middle of the day, when he and Ana were at a fundraising lunch. A witness had seen a man carrying a record player and television out of the front door; ‘I didn’t report it,’ the witness said, ‘because it was the man who lives there.’
‘It could have been anybody,’ I said.
‘Come on, Lex,’ Ethan said. ‘You know exactly who it was.’
I nodded to Delilah.
‘I’ve got the money,’ I said. ‘We don’t need to use what Mother’s left. And I can pay, for a recommended time frame, if you sign that form. But I want the name of the hospital. I need to speak to him myself.’
Delilah downturned her lips and wrinkled her forehead, in a freakish parody of my concern. She had made that face before, I thought, when we were children. We looked just similar enough for the impression to be accurate; that was why it hurt. ‘You’re so serious, Lex. You were always so serious. Whatever. Show me where to sign.’
She printed out her name at the bottom of the document, carefully, like a child in the term’s first exercise book, and I took the paper to check it.
‘I never did change my name,’ she said, ‘but I was always surprised that you didn’t change yours.’
‘The hospital, Delilah.’
I handed her the hotel notepad, and she wrote down the name of a well-known psychiatric hospital, an hour or so from London. Well, I thought. This will be expensive.
‘I’d get to him quickly,’ she said, ‘if I was you.’
‘And why’s that?’
‘The company Gabriel keeps – I don’t think you’ll be the only person after his cut.’
She looked around the room, retrieved her jacket, and crossed to the threshold.
‘But you wouldn’t know that,’ she said. ‘Would you?’
She had always walked with inverted feet. When she was little, it gave her a kind of bashful charm, but over time, Father became frustrated, and admonished her whenever he saw her toes beginning to turn. Now, I could only just make it out; she must have worked to correct it.
‘I suppose I’ll see you at Ethan’s wedding,’ she said. ‘So we have that to look forward to.’
‘Before you go—’
She had been standing in the darkness of the hallway, but now she stepped back towards me, into the early light.
‘You don’t really believe it,’ I said. ‘Do you? That they loved us? That they were trying to protect us? After everything that happened? You tried to escape, Delilah. I heard it. You and Gabriel. I heard what happened to him, that night in the hallway. The things that were done to us—’
Her face was changing.
‘We each believe what we want to believe,’ she said. ‘Don’t we? You more than anyone.’
A kind of resolution set across her features, then. It was the face that a child makes on the highest board at the swimming pool, when they decide to jump.
‘Yes,’ Delilah said. ‘You like to pretend that
you know best. But let me tell you what I think. I think you’re the saddest one of all of us. When we were children, and we had all of those … supervised visits. Who were they protecting us from? Girl A. The craziest of the lot.’
‘I’ll sort out the money,’ I said. ‘And I’ll let you know how long we can afford.’
‘Do you remember what you said to me the last time we spoke?’ she asked. ‘How things became this way? I bet that you can’t even remember that.’
‘Goodbye, Delilah.’
‘I’ll pray for you, Lex. I always pray for you.’
‘Well. Thanks.’
When I was sure that Delilah would have left the hotel, I walked through the lobby and up to Harley Street. Dr K’s office was set back from the street, behind the branches of a spindly pear tree. I knew it from the blue plaque, and an old stone shell above the door. Karl Ghattas had lived there: Philosopher, Surgeon, Painter & Poet, said the plaque. ‘I think that you should take it down,’ I had said to Dr K when I first visited. ‘That’s enough to make anyone feel inadequate.’ The street was still entombed in shadow, and I rested on the steps of the building and caught my breath. I found the windows of Dr K’s office, with the curtains drawn. It would be hours before she arrived, and she could be travelling, or on holiday. Besides, it was Monday. It was time to go to work.
Here is another story. Mother was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison, before a full courtroom. When the judge announced his decision, he clarified that one of Mother’s victims had made a specific request to approach her before she was taken from the dock. There was Delilah, with her arms outstretched. Ethan called me from the court steps, to castigate the whole hysterical process, and the next day, despite Mum and Dad’s protests, I bought every newspaper and read the reports. A court artist had captured the embrace. The judge is grave. Mother’s features are smudged with distress, and a fast pencil. But all you can see of Delilah is the back of her head. She could be weeping for the parents whom she had forgiven. She could be smiling into her noble, Motherless future.
We spent many sessions at the window above the plaque, with the court drawing on the table between us. Dr K seemed bored by this exercise. ‘There’s no answer to it,’ she said, ‘other than the one it would help you to believe.’ But I was obsessed with it, for a while. I kept turning the paper, as if I might find Delilah’s face on the other side of the page.
4
Gabriel (Boy B)
WE HAD COME TO the season of the wasps. In the taxi, one of the insects veered between the windows, until Devlin leaned across me, and crushed it between her phone and the glass.
‘The question,’ she said, ‘is whether you’re going to do it.’
On the seat between us was a pair of genomics testing kits, handed to us at the end of the day’s meetings.
‘Imagine,’ Devlin said, ‘if somebody had told me about the weakness in my heart. Would I have worked differently? Maybe I would be a yoga instructor. Or a gardener.’
‘I don’t think you’d have changed a thing. A nice gimmick, though.’
‘They were full of them.’
Jake, the CEO and founder of ChromoClick, had led the presentation. He had already done the backstory: six years before, he had been working as a PhD student at MIT, mid-lab, when he was called from the room by one of the senior doctors in the Biology Faculty. At that moment, he was two hours into a day-long observation of a yeast strain, awaiting a potential mutation, and he was reluctant to leave the room. He knew that something was wrong when the doctor placed a hand upon his shoulder, and said, ‘Spoiler alert, kid: the mutation never comes. Leave the yeast be.’
The news, which Jake had been half expecting, was that his brother had shot himself in the face, and Jake was half expecting this news because his father had shot himself before that, and his father’s father before him. Jake was the exception: the mutation which, against all odds, had finally arrived. He returned to the lab.
ChromoClick was now the fastest growing genetic service company in Europe. Its reporting service provided an extensive analysis of health and ancestry to individual customers, and funded a research arm which was asking what Jake characterized as the big questions: how to extinguish fundamental flaws from family lines, and how fundamental those flaws needed to be to justify extinction.
‘People have a natural curiosity about themselves,’ Jake said, ‘and we have a natural curiosity about helping people.’
‘They told a good story,’ I said.
‘They want a good price.’
The motorway passed behind dim windows. It was the kind of hot, flat day when everything looks uglier than it is. Devlin held one of the kits to the light and surveyed the packaging as if it might reflect her.
‘Dementia,’ she said. ‘A few coronary bypasses.’
I thought of my own list.
‘I think my time for spitting in a pot must have passed,’ she said. ‘If anything of importance happens to be lurking in my DNA, it’ll make itself known soon enough.’
The sky ahead was cluttered with buildings and cranes. ‘We should talk about the drafting,’ I said, ‘before we hit London.’
Devlin wasn’t listening. Still squinting at the test pack.
‘Not you, though,’ she said. ‘There’s still time for you to take up gardening.’
As it turned out, JP called me. The night receptionist, who treated each call with the same whiskery indignation, rang through to my desk and informed me that there was a gentleman on the line.
‘Who?’ I said. I was scrolling through the second page of indistinguishable sushi platters, about to order dinner. ‘I’m not expecting anyone.’
‘He didn’t have a real name,’ she said. ‘Just initials.’
‘Ah. OK. Yes, you can put him through.’
The line clicked, and JP cleared his throat.
‘Lex?’ he said, after a moment.
‘Hello,’ I said.
‘Hello. At last. You need a friendlier receptionist.’
‘We don’t do friendly. We do stamina and winning.’
‘That sounds about right. Well. Olivia said that you were in town. I just wanted to say hello. I heard about your mother.’
‘I’m fine,’ I said, although he hadn’t asked.
‘Good. When do you go back?’
‘It depends. There’s a deal here, and some family things to sort out. Maybe a few more weeks.’
‘Do you want to go for a drink or something, Lex? It would be good to catch up.’
‘I don’t know. This weekend – I’m going to see my brother. Early next week?’
‘Monday?’
‘Yes, Monday night. I’m in Soho.’
‘OK. I’ll find somewhere good.’
I could feel the old softening in my tone. I still wanted to amuse him. ‘My expectations are higher these days,’ I said.
‘I guess New York does that to you. I’ll do my best.’
‘OK.’
‘OK.’
So: the saga would continue. I sent a message to Olivia, expressing my displeasure, and ordered Health and Happiness.
It wasn’t that we had ever been rich, or even comfortable, but we hadn’t been poor. The poverty crept into our lives like ivy on a window, slow enough that you don’t notice it moving, and then, in no time, so dense that we couldn’t see outside.
Father developed strange fixations. They came like fevers, although some of them never left him. He decided that we were wasting water; it was a necessity, he said, and not a plaything, and he drew up a careful schedule of our weekly showers. When dinner was ready, he liked to serve it, and he did so with great deliberation. Our plates would be exactly equal, provided that one of us hadn’t misbehaved or challenged him that day, in which case the guilty party would have a little less. He reread Corinthians and decided that we should better glorify God with our bodies, and we spent our evenings marching up and down the stairs, trying not to laugh. He was bored. He presided over the living room, p
lanning his illustrious future: he would establish a website to present the truth of the Bible to children across the globe; he would become a pastor himself, and usurp David at the Gatehouse; he and Jolly would travel to America, to speak to the vast congregations there.
He spent a lot of time with Jolly in the kitchen of our house, with the liquor between them on the table, and meats sweating on their plates. He drove to Blackpool for Jolly’s Sunday sermons, and in the evenings he required us to sit in the lounge, attentive, while he repeated the lessons. Mother nodded to his inflections and held out her cracked palms in supplication. At her side, Delilah smiled. On the longer nights, I would try to catch Ethan’s eye, but he watched Father, his jaw clenched and harder than it had been a year before, and he didn’t notice me.
Ethan had left the primary school. There were no more travel artefacts, or Facts of the Day. He attended the high school in between our town and the next, where there were eight classes to a year, crunched across five concrete blocks. There had been some problem in buying his school uniform, so that he and Mother arrived home separately, not speaking. I watched him leave on his first day, while Delilah, Evie and I were still eating breakfast. ‘Why doesn’t Ethan’s blazer have a crest?’ Delilah asked, as he left the kitchen. The front door slammed behind him.
He would lose things: his English Literature texts; his gym shorts; and, in late November, the blazer. ‘You’ll have to do without, then,’ Father said, enthroned on the sofa with a tangle of wires and an amber glass.
‘That’s not really an option, though, is it,’ Ethan said. ‘You have to have one. You have to have one to go.’
‘You’re the one who lost it. Don’t come crying to us.’
‘Is there a second-hand bin?’ Mother said. ‘That kind of thing?’
That night, before bed, I thought of the teenagers who had watched us sit down to dinner at Dustin’s, and the expression they had shared. The image returned to me often, and whenever it did, it made my stomach ache. I wondered if there had been other looks, that I might have missed. ‘Was school good?’ I asked Evie, to think about something else.
‘Yep,’ she said. Gabriel occupied her old cot, now, his limbs long enough to bump against the bars, and she was in my bed. It was a good sleeping arrangement for winter, when I couldn’t feel much past my knees. ‘We’re doing animals from different countries.’