She didn’t tell Sam either. She almost did, but then she realised how he wouldn’t care at all about Joe being shielded, he would say she was being ridiculous, he’d be exasperated with her, he’d give her away. An appointment was made for her that very day, so there were no more suspicious envelopes arriving, not that Sam had been suspicious, but he might have become so. Three days later, she went to the hospital, remembering of course all those times a year ago when she had gone in and out so frequently. She’d hardly noticed her surroundings, she’d gone from her car in one direction only, as though attached to Joe by an invisible thread, hardly aware of which corridors she went along, which corners she turned, which doors she entered. Everything had been a blur until she reached his bedside. But now she noticed everything, every face, every notice, every trolley wheeled past. It seemed a different hospital, less dramatic, the atmosphere quite lackadaisical instead of urgent, and the clinic where she eventually found herself positively soporific.
It was crowded with women. Before, when Joe was here, she had felt important, she was even treated as someone of fleeting importance. Now she saw at once that she was of little interest to anyone. She handed in her appointment letter and settled down to wait. She’d brought a book, a paperback, Wild Swans, a good, thick, absorbing book about life for women in China over this century, which she was half-way through, but she didn’t read a word. She didn’t even take it out of her bag. There was a pile of magazines on a central table and she took three of those. Flicking through magazines was more suited to this kind of waiting. She flicked, surprised that so few others did. Mostly, the women were just staring, sighing, looking at watches. Some had their eyes closed. Only one knitted, the focus of great attention. Harriet felt guilty when her name was called after only ten minutes. She passed a row of accusing stares and heard one woman go to the desk and complain, only to be told she was seeing another doctor and he just happened to be late.
She was shown into a cubicle like a horse led into a stall for a race, barely room to take her clothes off and put a gown on. Someone banged on the door at the other side, the door leading out of the stall, and shouted, ‘Ready Mrs Kennedy?’ and she went through it. There was a high bed there, a strip of thick white paper laid along the length of it. She clambered up obediently. The doctor came round the corner in a hurry, nodded, and stood reading some notes. He explained what would happen and got her propped up on the bed. She closed her eyes as the instrument slid into her vagina and at once began thinking about Joe. It wasn’t logical. Joe hadn’t had any instruments sliding into any part of him. It was to do with the humiliation of her position, the feeling of being helpless and trapped, at the mercy of others. It was true, there was no pain, only a smarting sensation, the merest scraping feeling, and there had been pain for Joe. There was no violence, but she thought of him, on that night, and knew she had at last come closer to something of what he had felt. She couldn’t move, things were being done to her and she couldn’t move and it felt degrading being so exposed. She understood why Joe had hated the kind, kind doctors who treated him. They were so distant, so aloof in their kindness. Joe had been an object, she was an object. How could it be otherwise? It was only her body. It wasn’t her. The body was just flesh and blood and bone, a poor thing compared to the mind. She could rise above what was being done to her body, surely, literally rise above it, above this bed she lay on, and look down on the little scene and be detached. It wasn’t his body he cared about, Joe had said. He did then, when it was happening, when it hurt and the pain screamed through him, but not now, not afterwards. It was his head, what remained in his memory, the fear. To know such fear, she thought. To be weakened by such fear. Her own fear, of cancer, was different. Lying there, being probed and prodded, she knew her fear was not yet realised. Joe’s had been. He’d been gripped, held by it. It had overwhelmed him. Fear of death, then, fear that closed in on him and could not be conquered. He’d given in to it. It had swamped him, flooded into every fibre of his being, and that was what, even now, would not lift. He tried, she saw how he tried, but it was like trying to stem the tide. Again and again it came in, washing over the normal life he had reclaimed, and even though again and again it receded, it left its mark, and it left its threat of relentless return. She could never claim to know fear like that and it was a mistake to try.
‘Well, Mrs Kennedy,’ this doctor was saying, in his assumed jolly voice, ‘that wasn’t too bad, I hope?’
‘No,’ she said, clearing her throat. Of course it hadn’t been. She blushed, but he couldn’t know it was because of her shame at identifying with Joe’s suffering when she had no right to, when any comparison was absurd, insulting.
‘Good. Look, I think what we need to do here is have you in and do a cone biopsy. It’s just not possible to be sure in your case. We could cauterise the area, but I think you’d need it done again soon and in view of the fact that you’ve a history, a family history, I think we should be sure, okay? We’ll get it over with as soon as possible.’
A family history. She must have had to fill in a form some time, for Jennifer. For Dr Fenwick. Her mother had died of cancer of the cervix. That was the family history, that was what he meant. He’d already moved on, but a nurse was replacing the paper runner for the next patient. ‘Do I have to be admitted?’ she asked. ‘Can’t it be done in out-patients?’
The nurse shook her head. ‘Two nights minimum,’ she said.
Stunned, Harriet got dressed. How could she leave Joe for two nights without explaining? And Sam. She’d have to tell Sam. Without his help, she couldn’t shelter Joe.
*
Alan had left a message, it was just that she hadn’t seen it. He’d left it in a silly place and for a while that became the focus of her distress. It was all she said to him, over and over, why had he put a flimsy bit of paper like that on the table, didn’t he realise the moment the door opened it would fly off? Why hadn’t he propped it up against the flower vase, why hadn’t he weighted it down, why hadn’t he written it in huge capital letters on a large sheet of paper; why hadn’t he used the pad beside the telephone? . . . And Alan, equally upset, had countered with similar accusations, why hadn’t she said where she was going, why wasn’t she back for his tea, why hadn’t she telephoned and if she had he’d have been able to tell her and if she’d been at home, as she ought to have been, she’d have been the first to hear the news herself, and all this could have been avoided. She wasn’t even thinking, he finished, of the double shock to himself, first the worrying about what had happened to her and then the phone call about Leo, it had all been too much.
It had. For both of them. Once home the next day, they both subsided into monosyllabic exchanges, barely able to communicate at all after the avalanche of mutual recrimination. Sheila was exhausted, drained. It was an appropriate description, she thought, to say to herself how drained she felt, as though someone had indeed opened her veins and let all the life-giving blood out, leaving her a sack of loose bones in a too-big skin. All she wanted to do was to lie down and sleep. She climbed the stairs slowly, each step made with aching legs, holding on to the banister and pulling as hard as she could. She wished she had her own room. She didn’t want to share the double bed with Alan, she wanted to be on her own. There was no reason why she shouldn’t, with two other bedrooms – one Leo’s, one spare. Nobody ever slept in the spare, hadn’t for years. They’d discussed Eric James having it, at times when he seemed to be growing more feeble, but they knew it would never do for him, not with those steep stairs and the tricky bend in them. If it came to having to have her father live with them they’d have to put him in the little living-room at the front. He’d have to use the outside lavatory if he couldn’t manage those stairs. The spare room would stay spare, unless they took in lodgers, another often discussed and just as quickly dismissed notion. It had two beds in it, two single beds with only a few inches between. They hadn’t decorated it for years and years. It was dingy, clean but dingy, and she hardly e
ver went in it except to take down and wash the curtains every spring.
Leo had Pat’s old room. It had been natural putting him in there. Pat’s room was different, quite different from the rest of the house, the only room, apart possibly from the kitchen, that indicated the twentieth century was well advanced. What a fuss when Pat took up the carpet and painted the floor boards white – white! Alan was angry, he said she’d no sense, the boards were now ruined. The wood was good strong deal and she’d ruined it, saturating it with white gloss paint. Why couldn’t Pat just have varnished it? Varnished wood was very nice, he had no objection to that, and it was fashionable, wasn’t it? Varnished wood or whatever they called it, whatever they did to make floors look like that. But no, white gloss paint. And no curtains. That was what Sheila herself had objected to, the curtains and curtain rail taken down and a blind mentioned. She’d assumed it would be a Venetian blind, but what Pat had come home with one day was a flimsy straw thing. You could see through it, it kept out neither light nor prying eyes, she didn’t see the point of it, personally. It didn’t even go up and down properly. The strings operating it became quickly tangled and half the time it had to be rolled by hand.
Now, opening the door, she realised for the first time how little impression Leo had made on his mother’s room. He’d been in it nearly thirteen years but so little had changed. Except there was a different blind, a proper one, dark blue. She could have put the curtain rail back and hung curtains again, but somehow she hadn’t wanted to go against Pat’s own wishes. A rug covered half the floor but it was still white and hell to clean. Otherwise, everything was more or less the same right down to the exotic bed cover Pat had brought home from that first trip to Africa, a gorgeous scarlet and black and white affair, impossible to wash and too precious to dry-clean. Twice a year she took it into the yard and shook it and put it on the line and let it air in the sun. That was all she could do, but she never even thought of getting rid of it, she liked it, it was beautiful. More than could be said of the black wooden carved heads on the walls. She hated those. She’d taken them down when Pat died, and stuck them in the cupboard, right at the back, and there they had stayed until Leo found them when he was about ten and insisted on putting them back on the walls.
Pat’s maps were still there. One whole wall covered with a huge map of the world. It had flags stuck in places she’d been to, little pins with red flags on them. Another wall had detailed maps of Africa on it, she’d sent away to a shop in London for them. Sheila had always thought these four maps boring. They weren’t colourful, like the map of the world. There didn’t seem to be much on them, great acres of white space, others shaded beige or light brown. She went in and sat on the bed but she knew she couldn’t stay there. It was too hurtful. Alan would be appalled, he would read into her desertion things she didn’t want him to read, however true. It was silly, though, that they both still slept in their double bed. Why? Habit. Only habit. It wasn’t comfortable any more. Their sleeping patterns had been different for years now. When Alan was asleep he snored, snored most violently, and kept her awake. And when he got up during the night he disturbed her as she did him when she, too, had to get up and pace about to try to settle the annoying tingling and cramps in her legs. They didn’t cuddle any more, there was no point in being in a double bed for that. Sometimes, Alan’s hand would seek hers and squeeze it, or his leg touch hers, that was all the contact they had had since Leo was arrested. But there was no connection really. She felt old, that was the truth. She was always reading articles in magazines about how sex could continue happily into people’s eighties, but she found them ridiculous. She was only seventy, nearly seventy, but she had not felt amorous for a decade. Maybe there was something the matter with her, but she couldn’t believe there was. It felt natural to her. She had had all that, it was over. Whether it was for Alan too she wasn’t so sure. He knew and she knew that she had always been keener than he, something she had felt secretive about, something neither of them had openly admitted. And now she simply thought of sex as belonging to other people. In good time to Leo. Belonging to those who were young, their bodies unwithered, something she didn’t begrudge at all. But it would be a relief to have her own bed, if only it would not cause such trouble to stay here in Leo’s room, in Pat’s room, when there was trouble enough. Anything for a quiet life. So she left the room and went to her own and lay down there instead, on top of the cover, the pink candlewick bedspread she had once thought cheerful and modern. It washed well, that was one thing. It went in the washing machine and came out every time good as new.
Downstairs she could hear Alan in the yard, watering the window-box. Then he’d trim it, take the dead heads off the geraniums, cut here, cut there with his little scissors. Once, it had been a pity Alan hadn’t had a garden to play with, but now it was a good thing. He’d never have managed it. He wasn’t like Eric James, he wasn’t nearly as strong, and as he aged he seemed quite frail sometimes. A window-box, two window-boxes, back and front, and a hanging basket were enough. If the phone rang, Alan was nice and handy for answering it, but she hoped it wouldn’t. She couldn’t be bothered. They weren’t going to find him today, it was very unlikely, and that was the only call she was interested in. It seemed absurd to her, perverse, that they seemed to think Leo would make for home at some time – why would he do that when he’d said he didn’t want to come near it after he was released? If Leo rang, they were to keep him talking, and try to find out where he was. Again, they seemed to expect Leo to call. She didn’t. He’d finished with them, she could sense that. This running away was all part of it, part of avoiding having to give explanations, having to satisfy her. If he succeeded, if he got away successfully, she thought it more likely that he would write some time, years ahead, when he was settled.
She might be dead by then, of course. His great-grandfather would certainly be, but maybe that would be no bad thing. Eric James would complicate any return of the prodigal son. But she and Alan might be dead too. She was seventy soon and her own mother had died at seventy, though she wasn’t convinced this was relevant to any life expectancy of hers, because she was like her father, not her mother. Alan was seventy-one and both his parents were dead before that age so he might already be on borrowed time. They might both be dead when eventually Leo showed up, if he showed up. Or just Alan might be dead. She might be alive. Leo might come home and find her on her own. Then what would happen? With it all in the past, everything that had happened, would a reconciliation be possible? A real one? Involving at last being told exactly what had happened that terrible night?
Did mothers really die not knowing what had happened to their sons? Knowing they were out there in the world somewhere, but not knowing where or how they lived or with whom? The horror of it stole over her, her whole body grew cold, and then she was startled to feel the tears running down her face. She put her hand up and felt them and licked her fingers, disbelieving. To be crying, now . . .
*
Detective Sergeant Graham was furious. It wasn’t his responsibility if Leo Jackson had absconded, it didn’t reflect on him in any way whatsoever, how could it? But he was furious because if the boy were not found, then obviously he could not be produced in court when Gary Robinson came to trial. And Graham had been hoping great things from that confrontation, he was sure Leo would crack and very satisfactory that would be. He hated untidy cases and, though throughout his policing career he had learned that what he called untidiness and what others called loose ends were inevitable in the vast majority of instances, he nevertheless found them hard to accept. He couldn’t be reconciled to never quite knowing that that was the case. It was what made him a good policeman, his determination to push and push for a complete story. Others usually wanted that final knowledge, because they worried that a wrong might have been done and they wanted to be sure it hadn’t, but not he. It wasn’t that he didn’t care about justice, of course he did, but to worry about the absolute correctness of every sentence was
the way to go mad. You caught the criminals, you presented all available evidence, and then it wasn’t up to you, it was up to lawyers and magistrates and judges and juries. Leo Jackson had been convicted and sentenced without any shadow of doubt as to his complicity in the attack on Joe Kennedy.
Where the doubt came in was over how he came to be in Gary Robinson’s company and over what precisely he had done. It niggled away in his head, this lack of knowledge, knowledge only Leo Jackson could supply. Even more maddening was the boy’s attitude. It had remained consistent, very unusual with so young an offender, especially a first offender. The boy wasn’t truculent, he wasn’t aggressive, you couldn’t even call him sullen. He was just silent and composed. He had appeared to have no interest in what happened to him. There hadn’t been a single attempt at that well-worn plea of ‘It wasn’t my fault’. Yet maybe it wasn’t. And now Leo Jackson had done a bunk. He’d informed the parents – the grandparents – himself as soon as he’d been told, even if it wasn’t his job. Unfortunately, he’d got the father – the grandfather – unfortunately, because it was the mother – the grandmother – he would have preferred to catch. Catch was. the word, he might have caught all kinds of hints, things he hadn’t managed to pick up yet, indications of what really went on between that boy and his grandmother. But the grandfather was useless. He knew nothing, he was hopeless. There had been no point in catching him off guard. The fact that he didn’t know where his wife was or when she would be back had been the only interesting thing he’d gleaned. It could even be said to be suspicious, a woman like Mrs Armstrong virtually disappearing for the day at the same time as her grandson doing a runner. Graham had a little chat with Mr Armstrong under cover of telling him about Leo. He heard all about how worried Mr Armstrong was about his wife who hadn’t been right since her grandson was arrested. She couldn’t accept it even when Leo confessed to it. And she was getting worse and worse, Mr Armstrong said.
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