by Terry Tyler
The Dudleys’ marital home is in the village of Stenfield. Her parents also live locally.
The tragic incident is not being treated as suspicious. The funeral will be private, for family and close friends only. The family ask that their privacy is respected during this period of mourning.
Robert
April 2014
Amy
Amy
Amy
I’m numb.
Not being treated as suspicious.
They bloody well did think it was suspicious.
Toby was drunk when they took his statement, and opened his big stupid mouth to the police about my marriage being a bit of a disaster area, then they asked why I wasn’t there, too. Of course Toby’s got a record of being involved with dodgy people, and shit-awful money problems, and on the night in question I was having dinner with my boss and former girlfriend with whom I enjoy a close relationship. Oh yes, they put all those facts together. Had I offered Toby a way out of his debts if he bumped off the Mrs for me? Did Amy fall or was she pushed, to save me the trouble of a messy divorce? Given that my house was bought with my father-in-law’s money, was I after the life insurance instead of a no doubt meagre divorce pay out?
Granddad asked the detective who came up with these theories if he was a frustrated crime novelist, and I thought Amy’s meek and mild father might actually punch him.
Couldn’t believe Robsart stuck up for me.
He wasn’t sticking up for me, not really. He was sticking up for his wife. No scandal, you see. Bad for business.
There was no evidence, and my grandfather and father-in-law both have lots of money; the verdict of accidental death was decided upon fairly quickly.
I’m numb.
I didn’t love her and I no longer even felt much affection for her, but—oh, my God, no, I can’t process it in my head, I can’t accept it, I can’t even think about it—
won’t think about it. It’s the only way.
Beth said she seemed really erratic, reckless, and she was drinking too much, which wasn’t like her, but no one saw it happen.
She was drunk and wobbling about all over the place when she went up to her room to phone me, Beth said.
I never heard my phone ring. Yes, yes, the police verified that there was no conversation. Must have been around the time Erin and I were having brandy and she was phoning a taxi to go home.
Not suicide, not suicide, not suicide. I can’t think I drove her to that.
Don’t think about it.
Mustn’t think about it.
You don’t throw yourself off a first floor balcony if you want to kill yourself, do you? You take pills. You take a razor blade into the bath. You jump off bridges. You know, high ones that guarantee a fatal impact. You don’t take a little jump down one storey and risk staying very much alive but facing the rest of your life in a wheelchair, just to add to all your problems.
An accident.
Amy
Amy
Amy
I was working up to asking her for a divorce, and she knew I was. Beth said she was taking anti-depressants.
If I hadn’t stopped loving her she wouldn’t have been taking pills.
Mustn’t think about it.
Erin says I mustn’t blame myself.
Everyone says I mustn’t blame myself.
I bet that’s not what they say when I’m not there.
Amy’s parents blame me.
They say they don’t but I know they do.
I blame me.
Who else’s fault could it be?
If I’d loved her, she’d be alive, and that’s all there is to it.
I don’t want to go to Norfolk.
I don’t want to go there again, ever.
Amy
Amy
Amy
She didn’t deserve this.
She didn’t deserve me.
Chapter Eleven
Erin
April—December 2014
The only person Robert could bear to see after it happened was me, and I could only think of one thing that would be powerful enough to make him feel even one tiny, tiny bit better.
The bedtime reunion he’d always wanted (as had I, really) consisted mostly of him sobbing and me trying to comfort him.
It’s more of a shock when you see someone who is usually so in control break down completely, isn’t it?
Robert never did the tears bit. He’s always so proud, practical, strong.
I’ve wanted him to not be married to her for so long, and when it happened I’d have given anything (or a hell of a lot, anyway) for her to still be his wife.
Amy was not a colourful person but when I last saw her she seemed to have faded, almost as if she wanted to not be there. Which makes me wonder if she was actually suicidal, though I don’t think what happened that night was anything other than an accident.
People keep dying on me. Every few years it’s whoops, there goes another one.
My mother, my father, two half-brothers and two stepmothers.
Robert believes it was an accident, too. He told me he was working up to asking her for a divorce, but hadn’t done so; as far as he was concerned she was just going off to spend a few days with her friends, quite happily. But then husbands rarely know what’s going on in their wives’ heads, and vice versa.
He wasn’t asking her for a divorce on my behalf, I hasten to add. I’ve always told him that his marriage is his own business and I don’t want to hear about it. I’ve also made it clear right from Christmas 2009 when he turned up at the boardroom bash with her in tow that I would not have an affair with him.
Something I’ve noticed: women leave an unhappy marriage even if it means kipping on a friend’s sofa, just to get out of it. Men don’t leave until they’ve got another woman to go to. If they haven’t, they stay put, no matter how bad it is. No way was I giving Robert his get out; if he was that unhappy with Amy he would just have to grow the balls to do something about it all by himself.
I love Robert. I’ve loved him forever, but I shall never marry him. He’s the only man I’ve ever loved because he’s the only one who’s a match for me, and the only one my father would have considered worthy of me, too.
I always knew I would never get married. Marriage makes you unhappy or dead, from what I’ve witnessed. I said that to Robert once and he acted all appalled, but I could and did supply evidence to back up my theory. Izzy’s mum, my mum and Jaz’s mum, just for starters. If you don’t end up dead you get lied to and cheated on. Robert asked me to marry him when I was sixteen and he was twenty, and he’s kept on asking me. Now, he isn’t a stupid man by any means, but honestly! I look at him and his father, and I think, yeah, the Dudley men have a really great attitude to marriage—not! If you don’t love someone, don’t stay married to them. End of. Don’t waste her life as well as your own. Let her find someone who loves her, instead of putting her through years of anguish. Poor little Amy could have found some undemanding, country-living, nine-to-five sort of guy who would have made her very happy. Yeah, if you have kids divorce is hard on them, but they deal with it. Look at us three. Okay, okay, I know, Izzy’s the most screwed up person in the world, but I think she might have been anyway. I’m doing just fine, though, and darling Jaz was, too.
Oh, Robert.
I guess once the poor darling has manoeuvred his way through his guilt and grief he will start asking me to marry him all over again.
I shall bereavement counsel him through it, somehow. Nothing like learning from one who knows, eh?
I want love, I just don’t want marriage. Although I will never centre my life around a man, I don’t want to be like, for instance, Hannah. Her celibate existence works for her, but I need love and passion. I want to live, experience, feel every emotion intensely, but no way will I get shackled to some bloke who will take me for granted and go off screwing other women. Robert says he would never do that to me, but he will, one day. If someone cheats on me, I want
to be able to pack their bags and boot them out. End of.
Love’s a weird thing. It so often has so much other stuff attached. Sometimes it’s more the fulfilment of a need. Exhibit one: Izzy and Phil Castillo. When she met him she was starved of love and affection, and just needed a good shag, in the opinion of most of the men at Lanchester Estates. She saw mirrored in Phil’s empty blue eyes, the image of herself, in which she needed so badly to believe, but was never truly convinced by, so when she felt her dream slipping away, she clung to it by any means she could because she was terrified of going back to how she was before.
Poor old Iz.
The two people I cared about most were going through such hell.
I suspected Izzy’s wounds would take much longer to heal, if indeed they ever would. Robert was easier to help.
My sister was at the stage of going on weekend release to her mother’s when the tragedy with Amy happened. Hannah would pick her up and drive her out to Norfolk. Then, in May, those who decided such things said she was well enough to be discharged into Cathy’s care, pending regular revision and visits to her doctor.
Hannah thought this was a real step in the right direction, but I wasn’t so sure because I remembered something Izzy had told me, one day during that pain-filled muddle of months before she completely cracked up.
We were sitting on the sofa in the drawing room at home and she was drinking far too much wine, but I hadn’t the heart to make her stop. I’d just comforted her through a big sobbing bout; she was exhausted by it and couldn’t cry anymore. She curled herself up into the corner of the sofa (the lovely big sloppy one, Dad used to spend hours on it), and hugged a cushion.
“Do you know what my biggest fear is?” she said. “It’s that I’ll end up living with Mum, like two mad old spinsters. Can you imagine me and her in that cottage in Framlingham? Turn back the clock four hundred years and we’d be the two barmy old witches of the village, making potions to cure ills out of bats wings and coltsfoot. I’ve been scared of that ever since I was a teenager. Phil was supposed to save me from it.”
I thought of that, on the day Hannah was to take her back to Framlingham, with all her belongings.
She’d been up to Norfolk to pick Cathy up first, before collecting Izzy, which seemed like a heck of a complicated excursion, back and forth, but she thought it was important that Izzy’s mother was with her when she left the safety of the hospital. Her idea was to stop somewhere nice on the way back to Norfolk the second time, for lunch or tea depending on the time of day, so it would seem like a bit of a jolly day out. I thought that was gruesome. Hannah wanted me to go too, but there was no way I wanted to be one of the three people to whom she was closest (now that Jane was in Spain and Castillo was as far away as possible) delivering her to the fate she’d dreaded for so long. It would have made me feel like a gaoler.
D-Day was a Saturday in late May. I was alone, as I had been the evening before. Despite my fledgling relationship with Robert, we were keeping very low key, and had not ‘come out’ as an item, because it would be beyond inappropriate for us to be seen as anything approaching such a thing; he was spending the weekend with his parents.
I’d worked until eight the night before, and got home to find that the ever-wonderful Pat had left me a lasagne and a nice bottle of red, breathing away. I ate dinner in front of two episodes of Homeland on the TiVo, then went to bed and fell asleep in front of the third. Morning dawned, bright and beautiful. I love weekend mornings. They’re mine. Such a huge part of my life is given over to the company, you see. I’m usually in the office before eight, just to get a bit of peace before the phones start ringing, after which my day is a flurry of meetings, calls, decisions, reports, everyone wanting a piece of my time. Every single day at around four p.m. I wonder what has happened to all those hours, and I worry because I haven’t got enough done, which is why, if I don’t have a social engagement (they’re usually work-related anyway), I often work late, too. My wonderful secretary, Blanche, sometimes brings me in a Chinese or a salad before she goes, and mostly I eat just enough of it to sustain me for the next couple of hours and chuck the rest. That’s just my life, and I love it, I have to do it, I don’t have a choice because I will make the company even more successful than it was in Dad’s time, and I will keep the promises I made about treating the employees decently, maintaining quality while expanding but still keeping us financially healthy and—well, look, that’s just how it is. Thank goodness for Will, Cecilia and Robert; anyway, what I was coming to is how I feel on Saturday mornings.
If I’m alone, I just lie there and enjoy the peace. I like hearing Pat downstairs doing whatever Pat does. I look out of the window onto the garden, I potter down in my pyjamas, drink coffee and talk to Pat if she’s in the kitchen. I like to sit at the kitchen table, it’s my favourite place in the house. Memories of all those family meals in years gone by. Dad and Jaz.
That day I had nothing much planned. I would probably escape into a novel for a while, get my eyebrows waxed and my nails done in the afternoon, and in the evening I was going to see some friends for dinner.
I’d flopped out on the sofa with a second coffee and a good Deborah Moggach, still in my pyjamas and big furry slippers, when the doorbell rang. I wasn’t expecting anyone so I let Pat get it.
A moment later she put her head around the door, eyes wide.
“It’s Isabella’s mother,” she said. “She says that she hopes you don’t mind the intrusion, but, er, she thinks it’s time you two met.” She mimed a terrified face; not much about our weird and complex family gets past Pat.
I laughed, in that way you do when you’re scared and nervous, sat up and said, “Fuck!”
Cathy. The woman whose life my mother wrecked, who I presumed hated me, too, by association. My sister’s mother, who I’d never actually met, apart from when I was too grief-stricken to notice. The name that had echoed in the shadows of my life for, like, ever. And there was me, sitting in my pyjamas. The top had coffee down it, I hadn’t brushed my hair and I wasn’t wearing a bra.
“Fuck!” I said again. I would have to go out into the hall in order to get upstairs to change, which meant she would see me. “Take her into the kitchen and make her coffee!” I yelped. “No, that’s rude, isn’t it? Oh, shit, it’s either that, or the study, isn’t it? Will the study look as if I’m interviewing her?” There was me, the big business executive, and just the thought of meeting Cathy made me act like a gauche idiot.
“It’s Saturday morning,” Pat said, with amusement. “The kitchen will be okay.”
“Okay!” I leapt up. “Do it. Now!”
As soon as I heard them walk past the door I zoomed upstairs, flung on leggings, bra, shirt and pumps, hurled a brush through my hair and squirted on perfume. There was no need for me to be haring around like a mad thing, I’m sure she was happy to wait, but I was in a state.
I lit a cigarette but put it out almost immediately. Memories of getting into trouble with the grown-ups for smoking, I suppose.
Cathy had come to see me. After all these years.
Deep breaths. Compose. Cathy wasn’t a monster, and, most importantly, I wasn’t my mother.
I took the stairs slowly and purposefully.
She sat at the kitchen table with a cappuccino; Pat had put one there for me, too, and made herself scarce.
Bloody hell. Cathy.
She must have been in her early sixties, if my quick calculations were right, and she certainly looked it. Her hair was short and grey, she wore no make-up, no jewellery, and the sort of flowing garments that large-ish older ladies like Hannah wear, though whereas Hannah knows what suits her, and enjoys clothes for their own sake, Cathy gave the impression that she dressed only for comfort and camouflage. Izzy had never been interested in that sort of thing either.
She just looked at me as I walked in. I mean, stared. I’d say ‘as if she’d seen a ghost’ if it wasn’t the most ghastly cliché.
“Hello,” I said,
and I smiled. I sat down opposite her and said, “This is a massive surprise, Cathy, and I am really, really nervous.”
And then she smiled too, and when she did, everything changed. She looked kind, and I could see a little of the old Isabella in her face.
“I thought it was time,” she said. “Isabella’s told me what a good sister you’ve been to her lately, and I wanted to thank you.” Then she reached across the table and patted my hand. “And bury the hatchet, too. Not that it was ever yours and my hatchet, but you know what I mean.”
“Yes.” I felt overcome with emotion, then. “It must be very strange for you, being back in this house.”
“Oh yes,” she almost whispered. “I loved it here, so much. I used to sit here with Isabella when she was little. We had a housekeeper called Mrs Hamworth. Back in the days when your father and I were happy together.” Her lips tightened. “Mind you, he was probably out and about with his various mistresses while I sat at home holding the baby, even then.”
I didn’t want the conversation to go down that route. “I wouldn’t know,” I said. “Before my time.”
She smiled. “Yes. Don’t worry, I’m not going to start raking up the past. I just wanted you to know that I don’t hold grudges anymore. Since turning my soul over to God, I’ve at last managed to eradicate the bitterness I harboured for so long.”
“That’s great,” I said, weakly. I never know how to react when people express an improvement in their lives via spiritual enlightenment. Good for you. Cheers to that, then. I mean, what do you say? “I’m glad your belief has helped you find peace.” Ah, that was better. A bit.
“It has indeed,” she said. “For so many years I felt consumed by hatred towards your mother and then towards you, I’m ashamed to say. When Annette passed over to a better place I still couldn’t rid myself of it; even when I was happily married to Roy it remained bubbling away under the surface and filling my heart with bile. But now I’m free from it, and I thought it was important that I tell you I can finally forgive your mother for what she did to me.”