by J.G. Ellis
Chapter Twenty
I sat in my office, staring out through the barred windows at the trunks of the trees, though my efforts to concentrate, or meditate, on them were crowded by swimming images of squalid deaths, of young people mutilated by trains or hanging from trees or the backs of wardrobes. I was – politically or diplomatically, as it were – being left alone for a while, allowed a period of solitude, of undisturbed contemplation. I could, of course – yes, of course – have gone home if I’d so wished – retired wounded, temporarily it would be generously assumed, from the field of battle. I had, narcissistically perhaps, blamed myself for Lorraine’s death, for failing to save her; but the/my responsibility had been diffused by her suicide note, which I hadn’t expected to exist. Found in her grotty little room, it was written on the back of a postcard that depicted Ixtab, the Mayan goddess of suicide: I’m going to die today. Anyway, I hope I’m strong enough not to be alive tomorrow. I’ll be in prison if I am. Imagine being so useless that you can’t kill yourself. I wish I’d been able to do what Ade wanted, but I couldn’t; I was weak. I’m so pathetic. I wish I’d never been born. Being me is the shittest thing you can imagine. You have no idea. I don’t know why it was all so crap. It’s always been crap. Maybe that’s just how it is and I couldn’t handle it. Bye. So not your fault, Barbara. You shouldn’t blame yourself. It would have happened anyway. Was that true? Was there nothing I could have done or said? Was she, by the time she got to me, beyond saving? Had the Rubicon already been crossed? Was I talking to the dead? Nonsense, surely, and fanciful, exculpatory nonsense at that. The die had not been cast, and I had missed an opportunity to save her – though no-one could reasonably blame me for not so doing.
So another damaged, broken young person ends her own life. Who – colloquially speaking – gives a shit? Darwinian rules apply: if you can’t hack it, you can’t hack it. We, the living, mourn to make ourselves feel better. The dead are beyond caring. Was I happy in this life? I think I thought I was. Vanity probably played, and plays, its part. I had what consensus opinion would describe as a good life: an interesting and stimulating, even important, job. I had succeeded in life. I loved and was loved in return. I took holidays in foreign climes. I, we, had decided it was immoral to bring children into such an ugly world. Was this a failure – in me and us – of the optimism bias? People had mortgaged their – sometimes materially successful – lives to procreate, to bring forth their little bundle of genetic combination, and failure to do so was regarded as a tragedy. So what? So we were not fully paid up members of the game of life, and/or the human race therefore. It is only the thinking that suffer because it is only the thinking that think. The unthinking just do and act unthinkingly. Life just is. There is no why or wherefore. Democracy is just a tyranny of morons, and/or of a sneering, knowing elite that contemptuously exploit and manipulate them. Who decides your children go to, and die in, whatever war? Not you, certainly. You accede, and you mourn, and you offer photographs of remembrance on prime-time television. You don’t, of course you don’t, question the merits of the war. How could it possibly be wrong? Your betters decided it was right and proper and your son or daughter died for the dubious cause. The thinking, if thinking there be or ever was, stops there. Anything other is too hideous to contemplate and will remain comfortably uncontemplated. A higher power, not to be questioned, has whored your offspring into death. All that remains to you is the indulgence of an honourable mourning, and who but a monster would seek to rob you of that. History is littered with the slaughter of millions of young people in pointless wars, and yet we remain shocked, appalled, morally offended, by a single teenage suicide.
The tree trunks returned to the foreground of my perception with shocking clarity, the patterns on the barks vivid and vital. I realized I had been crying, or weeping, without being aware of it – tears flowing down my cheeks without sniffles or convulsion. I could not reasonably, then, have claimed to be a reliable witness to my emotional state. I had a sense of endings, but questions remained. There were things – based on nothing more than intuition – that I thought I knew. I thought I knew that Caroline Meadows had been at the Picnic in the Dark. And, in my preferred narrative, so too had Lisa Markham, but I worried that I had been seduced by both at some intellectual level, and then worried, modestly perhaps. that the appeal might, instead, be – have been – emotional; more likely was an intoxicating and dangerous mixture of the two, though it was entirely possible that the intoxicating lure, or allure, would lead me to the truth – or, more prosaically, what actually happened. Who had put the sign around his neck, and why? Who had taken the pictures and filmed the video? Who was there, and – again – why? And, appallingly, did it matter? Wasn’t it enough to know that he hadn’t been murdered? I could imagine it could easily be spun that way by more senior, politically-orientated officers, particularly when they started costing – Don’t be sniffy now, Barbara – the investigation; if not that, then a vulgar clamour for arrests on minor murder-less charges. I could hear the plonking voice of common sense: Gee, we must be able to get someone on something – I mean, someone died, and they were there. Clunk! This, or the risk of this, has or had to do with appearances, with civic PR. All those young people killing themselves – sympathies go out to family and friends, etc – but, really, not our fault or responsibility, no-one to blame. Didn’t we provide the best of all possible worlds? More counselling, anyone – well, until the money runs out or the press stop taking notice? What’s seen to be happening is always more important than what’s happening, and what’s happening frequently stops happening when someone that matters stops or starts noticing.
Sergeant Turner appeared in the doorway – tentatively, apologetically. Perhaps he was aware he’d been here before, or perhaps I was just being fanciful. He said, “I apologise for disturbing you, ma’am, but there’s another young lady who’d like to speak to you.” He was – of course – just doing his job, but he was better than that. He transcended his role by recognising, by being aware of, his plight. So: Another young lady to see you, ma’am. We can but hope – for your sake and ours – that she doesn’t end up dead. Sergeant Ron Turner, unbenighted messenger and butler in the service of doom, announced that Caroline Meadows wanted to speak to me. How dismal that this should have lifted my spirits. Why was she here? To confess to death-related things – or just to smile and philosophise?
I stood up. I may even have done something gauche like nervously smooth down my skirt as I did so. I was ridiculously aware of myself, as though I had become huge and clumsy. I think I may have been in a state of – hopefully minor – shock.
She was standing in the foyer under the strip-lighting, her hands in the pockets of a flowy calf-length black skirt. She was wearing a ruffled, loose-sleeved white blouse with a hip-length waistcoat that matched the skirt. Her hair was untied, though two clasps kept it back off her face. She was dressed for something, I thought: me or posterity, or a funeral. A friend once remarked that she preferred funerals under a grey sky; sunshine wasn’t quite the right lighting for the scene, she said. She added that she liked it to be raining a little – just a drizzle really – with a slight wind to blow the skirts of her coat about her legs. Death – or its occasion – offers theatre for the living. Caroline might have been posing on a bridge of some renown – for some shutter-captured moment of historical significance. One imagined the result rendered monochromatically, in shadow and light, in elegant black and white: Caroline on the Pont des Nuages. Survivor of the generation of despair. Died at her retirement home in northern Italy at the age of 83 after a successful career as a writer and cultural commentator. Her novel Staring into the Abyss Without Jumping won a national book award and was made into a successful film.
She smiled and said, “I thought I’d come and see you for a change.” Then, on closer scrutiny: “Have you been crying? You look like you’ve been crying. I think you’re too sensitive for the police.”
I heard myself ask, “Why
are you here, Caroline? What do you want?” My voice grated on me – ragged and brittle, like a sharp pebble tumbling around a rusty tin can.
She pouted pettishly; succeeded in looking wounded. “Oh, dear; I’d sort of convinced myself you’d be pleased to see me. Do at least pretend. I might be dead the next time you see me.”
There was a moment of lightning – blind – emotion when I might have done something silly, acted, as it were, in the white heat of the moment; but thankfully, for dull, social reasons, I did nothing, a tribute I suppose, at least arguably so, to my self-control – more likely, to the power of the default position, which, in my case, is not doing, or nothing doing, is inaction, or the absence of action. I might have slapped her – it’s what I wanted, perhaps needed, to do – and I rather conceitedly imagined that that’s what some notional other person in my situation would have done, would have surrendered to, and having so surrendered would later, when the passion had passed, have expected to be forgiven – or, at least, understood – for something that might generously be excused as a motive lapse. All of which means what exactly – that I nearly did something I’m glad I didn’t? No, actually there was a small, morally ambiguous, part of me that wished another part of me had been big – or sanguine – enough to risk it, to transgress in that way in that moment; and, by so transgressing, have placed myself in her hands, at the mercy, the graciousness or lack thereof, of her reaction.
When the passion had passed without incident, I mentioned the picnic in the dark. I was rather hoping to surprise her with it, to discern something from her reaction, but she must have scented the lightning, or heard the thunder as the danger passed – thus skipping the surprise accidentally because she was too preoccupied with me. My own fault, then. She said, “I thought for a moment you were going to hit me. I wouldn’t have minded – at least, not terribly. I think you’re probably a little bit in love with me. I had a teacher who told me on her last day she was a little bit in love with me. I think she was relieved to be leaving.”
I said, “The picnic in the dark, Caroline?”
She said, “What about it?” There was an eye-rolling quality to her tone and expression, bordering on contempt. Surely I hadn’t really expected her to be surprised or shocked, or even bothered. The Picnic in the Dark – it happened, so what? I thought you knew about that. Oh, you want to know who was there – it really is that tedious.
I said, “What was it, Caroline – a kind of last supper?”
She laughed and said, “Yes, our last supper – in honour of Adrian and his sister. The flame flickered in the darkness, and we toasted death and the triumph of art. And fearlessness – because they need you to be afraid to exploit you. They need you to be afraid to turn you into good little whores performing all the right tricks in their free market with a jaunty smile on your face. They want to buy and own you at a competitive, knock-down, bargain price. Adrian was never going to be bought or owned.”
I said, “I need to know who was there, Caroline.”
“No, you don’t,” she said. “What difference does it make? Someone was there and went home after the event – disappointed that the bonfire didn’t happen. So what? I mean, gee, we were promised a bonfire. Why don’t you find the drunk old tramp who was watching us from behind a dead tree? He must remember us; we hardly had anything on, and we were wearing Venetian opera masks. I think he had a walking-stick, or a crook, and was carrying a lantern of some sort. A breeze rustled the leaves of the trees, and an owl hooted the end of night.”
I said, “Caroline, I have considered a care order.”
She said, “Of course you have. I would, too, in your situation – just from the point of view of covering yourself. I wouldn’t blame you, but I would be disappointed. Do you want absolution now or later, or is your better self going to prevail? I think it is.”
I said, “I think you’re bit of a monster, Caroline.”
She smiled. “What you mean is I’m not afraid enough to be controlled. Actually, I’m not afraid at all. I’m perfectly happy to be dead tomorrow. That’s impossible to combat unless you’re willing to strap me down and stop me moving, and I don’t think you’ve quite got the stomach for that. Anyway,” she continued, “I came here to give you these.”
The these she wanted to give me – pulled out of either pocket – were Adrian’s mobile phone and his suicide note, both in sealed plastic bags. There was an element of premeditation and theatricality about this level of detail and delivery – a considered response to events gone, or going, awry.
I asked the obvious question. “Where did you get these?”
“Lorraine,” she said. “She asked me to give them to you. She was going to give them to you herself, but you scared her. I think she was afraid you might lock her up.”
“When was that?” I asked sharply. I was thinking of a wounded bird fleeing the car. “When did you get these?”
“This morning,” she said. “I can’t remember the exact time. Does it matter?”
I knew, then, that she knew Lorraine was dead, but I also knew she wouldn’t admit to it – indeed, that she’d be unwise to do so. Lorraine had given her Adrian’s suicide note and mobile phone, and then perhaps engaged in some self-indulgent reflection – a confession of sorts – on her own failure, all surely permissible for the soon-to-be dead. Caroline would, no doubt, have graciously indulged her. She would have understood, have offered reassurance, have promised to do what the doomed girl asked of her. And now, in the sure and certain knowledge that Lorraine was beyond moral and legal reproach, here she was doing it by coming to me. But first she would have waited, waited until she could safely assume the deed had been done, the exit achieved. She had not tried to dissuade her; she had not tried to save her life. Death was the given, the ultimate out, the smirking, triumphal character at the centre of everything.
I said, “Do you know where Lorraine is now?”
“No, I don’t,” she said without hesitation. “I thought you might know.”
“I think you do, Caroline. I think you knew when she gave you these that she was going off to kill herself – and you gave her plenty of time to do it before coming here. I can’t even be sure she ever had these. You might have had them all the time. The dead can be blamed for anything.”
“I wouldn’t do that,” she said. Slight offence taken, but no shock or surprise at the news of Lorraine’s death.
“Whose idea were the plastic bags?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Not mine. Probably Adrian’s. He wanted to be tidy about things. Is it that important?”
“Who put the sign around his neck?”
“I don’t know that either,” she said. “Maybe it was the tramp with the lantern. Why are these things so important to you? Do you have boxes you have to tick? I suppose you do. I don’t know, and I probably wouldn’t tell you if I did.”
“Why was Adrian so particularly interested in you?” I asked.
“I don’t know that he was,” she said. “He was interested in lots of people. He liked people – though mostly he felt sorry for them.”
I said, “There’s a blog that only you and he had access to. That suggests more than just a general interest, don’t you think? Just the two of you – your own private blog.”
“I reminded him of his sister.” She said this in a slightly hushed tone. “He was a bit obsessed with me. I think we were a bit in love, but my age frightened him. He thought girls my age were vulnerable to the attentions of older boys because it made us feel more mature, and he didn’t want me to think in the future that he’d exploited or taken advantage of me in some way. He admired my writing and was obsessed with his sister’s. He felt a major talent had been crushed by a vulgar, uncaring world, which is probably not far from the truth. It probably happens a lot. Success is money now, and some people are ruthlessly single-minded in pursuit of it. Art is a distraction that most people don’t care about. There is a horrible arrogance about money. If you’ve got lo
ts of it, you think you deserve it and are better than people who don’t have it. Nobility and grace and art are sneered at by money.” She paused, remembering herself, reining herself in. “Anyway, we used to discuss stuff like that all the time. It doesn’t matter now, does it? People like us always lose – the cruel and ruthless prevail. They bomb and rape the planet in the name of oil, and torture animals in the name of medicine – and then patronise anyone who thinks we shouldn’t be prepared to go that low. There must be something really wrong with us.”
I asked her if she’d ever met Lisa Markham. I think I had some idea that she might have known about – and been jealous of – her relationship with Adrian.
She said indignantly, “Why are you asking me about Lisa? Lisa has nothing to do with it.” I thought I detected a hint of protectiveness.
“Is that a yes, then, Caroline?” I asked.
“It’s actually none of your business. She’s got nothing to do with this. You might as well investigate my mother.”
“Your mother wasn’t having an affair with Adrian,” I said; “nor did she come into the police station to report him missing.”
She said, “I think I’d better go. You’ve got what I came to give you – and this is a wholly inappropriate conversation to be having in the foyer of a police station.” A smartly-dressed elderly woman came into reception with a cartoon-snooty chihuahua on a leash. Caroline nodded at them as she walked out. For some absurd reason, to do perhaps with the vanity of authority, I had imagined she wouldn’t leave until – implicitly at least – I’d given her permission to do so. As it was, I found myself chasing after her, feeling rather like some dreadful, doorstepping reporter. It was silver and grey outside and raining thinly. She turned and said, “I can’t believe you’re following me. What do you want? Seriously – why are you so interested in things that aren’t important?”
I said, “I need to understand what happened, Caroline. I need to know who put the sign around his neck, and I need to know who was at the picnic.”
She said, “You don’t know there was a picnic. Maybe Lorraine made it up. Maybe it was a myth, a legend, Adrian wanted her to create for him,” – she gestured loosely and inclusively – “and you, and me, and us – or maybe it was something she wanted to create for herself. You’re never going to know now, are you? She’s dead. You don’t even know if she stabbed him. You only have her word for that. Maybe she was taking the blame for someone else – me or Lisa, or the girl in the golden mask. I can tell you anything now, so long as it fits with the little you do know. What would you like to hear? There were thirteen of us at the picnic, including Adrian. We arrived independently and wore masks because we were worried about infiltrators and informers. Three of us waded out to the boat after the failed cremation and hung the sign around his neck. Why did we do that? Because we didn’t have a dunce’s cap, and we baulked at the idea of using a marker pen on his face. We had some idea we were protecting the weak and vulnerable, and the easily led, by defacing a dangerous icon. Or maybe we were just drunk or stoned.” She paused. “Is this the sort of thing you want? What about a bit of sex by the water to spice it up for the press?”
I said, “I don’t find this amusing, Caroline.”
“Why don’t you arrest me, then – or whatever it is you have to do to get me in one of those dark rooms with my mother and a lawyer and a tape machine? Then you can ask your questions in a po-faced, self-important way, and tell me I’ll be in serious trouble if I don’t answer them. My mother can add pathos by quietly sobbing into a handkerchief.” Her tone softened. “Can I go now, or do you want to detain or hold me, or whatever, so I can help with your inquiries?”
I looked up at the sky, which was darkening; felt the fine needles of rain on my face. A child screamed somewhere across the road. It was a sulky, resentful, rebellious scream, a screech really. It signalled a battle of wills with – a protest against – a power greater than itself. A parental thwarting of childish desire was going on, prosaic and commonplace. No, you can't do, or have, that: not now, not today, not until I say.
Caroline sighed. “One day the Earth will just be an empty, lifeless rock going round a dead sun, and no-one or nothing will ever know or care that we’ve been here. I don’t think we’re going to make a good world in the meantime, do you?”
I let her go. What else was there to do? To have held her would have been weak and wretched, a nebulous, childish fear of the dark. I believed that she might take her own life – indeed, that it was a distinct possibility – but not that she intended to do so; and I suppose I believed, at bottom, that she was best placed to decide. She had succeeded in convincing me that they knew best for them, and that she knew best for her.
I returned to the office and read Adrian’s suicide note: If you can’t reproach me for this, then I’m dead. Call it selfish and cowardly if you wish – truly, it’s your pain. And you are, after all, the ones with the problem – you must find a way to go on living. You will, of course – most of you anyway. It’s amazing how absurd everything ends up sounding. Afraid to die, everyone seems to be making paltry excuses to go on living. The creature IS, so must find a reason and rationale to stay that way. I think I died when my sister died. She was a beautiful, incredibly talented person who was too gentle and sensitive for the ugly world she was expected to survive in. I’m truly sorry for the pain caused to the already broken. I hope what remains isn’t too unbearable.
I examined his phone, but not for very long. It had been factory reset, probably something to do with his desire to be tidy about things. I passed it on for form’s sake – with next to no expectation that it would yield anything useful to the investigation. So what. So what did I/we know? We knew that Adrian had been stabbed post-mortem, though we hadn’t found the knife. We knew that someone had hung a disparaging sign around his neck, though we didn’t know who or why or when. I believed that Adrian had gone to the lake with person or persons unknown, and with enough drugs and drink already inside him to – in the absence of medical intervention – kill him. I knew that drugs and drink had killed him. There was a preponderance of evidence to suggest, very strongly, that he had – whether, or not, aided or otherwise abetted – committed suicide. So much so that it seemed – in the absence of some compelling puncturing point to the contrary – absurd to suggest otherwise. The Picnic in the Dark could have been an invention, a making of history or mythology, as Caroline had suggested. Lorraine might have used the term to Caroline and others after the fact, and they had then conspired not to deny or denounce it – it being the myth she wanted and needed to create. No-one need have knowingly gone, or been invited, to a picnic in the dark, no-one need have thought at the time Oh, we’re having – or going to – a picnic in the dark. What had happened at the lake had happened, and the mythologising, the turning of it into a narrative, a history, had come later. Actually, that didn’t quite ring true. Someone – the person who had recorded and posted the video – had certainly gone to the lake with posterity in mind, and it was likely they weren’t the only one or ones to have done so. Perhaps more had been planned and scheduled in the way of multimedia, but second-thoughts were currently keeping heads prudently down. Everyone, these days, was managing their message and making editorial decisions. Perhaps there was more to come, but perhaps now wasn’t quite the time – the climate not being right, and all that. Media landscapes change and undulate with today’s topless sensation becoming tomorrow’s spiked discretion, the bottom line and the next television football franchise being the better part of it.
I went back to the scene of crime reports and re-read them, looking for some tangible evidence, or passing allusions thereto, of a picnic or gathering. Had drinks been passed around? Toasts been made? It wasn’t hard to imagine that alcohol and drugs might be more important than food on such an occasion – something to enhance the surreal scene-setting and perhaps, incidentally, to keep the pre-dawn chill at bay.
For reasons to do with mood and
whim rather than investigation, I returned to Amberton park. I wanted to walk round the lake, revisit the scene of the crime - or, rather, the event. Bouquets of flowers wrapped in paper and plastic had been left round the lake with their small, calling-type cards offering messages of condolence. It was, and had been, raining, so they were looking rather sorry and soggy and weathered. Ink had run, and small puddles had formed in the cellophane. They, the bouquets, looked cheap and tacky, tokens really – the flowers unconsidered and possibly unnameable by those who had purchased them – really the sort of flowers men pick up at petrol stations as a desperate afterthought on Valentine’s day. There’s something distasteful about flowers clipped and wrapped in paper and plastic, beauty and nature tamed and vulgarised into a crass quick-turnaround product. It’s the same lack of aesthetic sense that imagines a bird can be admired in a cage, or that a butterfly’s beauty is enhanced by being chloroformed and pressed between the pages of a book.
I noticed a woman standing alone at the side of the lake. Caroline’s mother. I noted this without surprise or emotion, and I think she must have noticed me before I noticed her. At any rate, she was unsurprised at my approach – indeed, seemed rather to be expecting it. She was staring out across the lake, holding a black umbrella, her other hand in the pocket of a raincoat, also black, its belt undone and hanging down at the sides. She smiled and said, “I thought for a moment you might not recognise me, but then you are a detective, so presumably you have a good memory for faces.” She turned and looked out over the lake. “This is where it happened, isn’t it? This is where he died.”
I said, “Yes, it is.”
“And you think Caroline was involved?” A hint of amusement, of pride even. “She probably was. Caroline’s inconveniently intelligent, Ms Black – inconvenient for her, I mean, and for those who care about her. She thinks too much about the world, and it makes her angry and miserable, though she’s become rather good at keeping it to herself recently. Her teachers describe her as intelligent, but... There’s always a but. One teacher described her as thoughtful, and rather made it sound like an affliction. She doesn't have the right sort of intelligence, you see. What passes for intelligence in the media and popular culture is little more than a skill-set – calculating ability, creative problem-solving, a capacity for retaining facts and figures. It’s perfectly possible to be intelligent and also dull and uncaring, and most intelligent people are usually one or the other, or both. That sort of intelligence has nothing to do with insight or morality, or a large world-view. Rather, it’s a narrow skill narrowly applied – much admired and encouraged in schools and universities. The computer programmer is the modern apotheosis of this type of graceless intelligence. Gee, I made a tool to exploit people and a weapon to kill them, and now – shock, horror – someone's using them to exploit and kill. Boo. That makes me sad. Still, on to the next opportunity to be clever and well-compensated. Most people don’t want to reflect on the consequences of their actions or inactions. What they want is to live in their little bubble and feel good about themselves. To do this, they must be completely ignorant and uninterested in anything beyond the bubble, or else buy into a simple and childish narrative about the world beyond it. Most people do some version of the latter. The thoughtless and vulgar have inherited the Earth.”
I was reminded of Martha Bottomley talking about Emma Mansfield. Clearly Mrs Meadows thought the world wasn’t good enough for her daughter, and Martha had certainly thought something similar on Emma’s behalf. I said, “Does it not worry you that she might be in the process of persuading herself that life’s not worth living?”
She said, “Oh, dear, you sound like her heart-of-gold, commonsensical friend. Well, we all need one of those, I suppose, to get us through the darker nights. Chin up, and all that; it could be worse. Are you reproaching me? Do you think I’m failing her – letting her down in some way? Perhaps I should take her shopping at the local mall, get her something pretty to wear, something bright to compensate for all those dark thoughts she insists on having.”
I said, “Is it not possible she might be depressed? Depression takes many forms.”
She sniffed. “And what form would you have it take, Ms Black? One that conveniently allows you to characterise a bright young woman’s philosophic take on a vile world as a species of mental illness? This is the sharp edge of Panglossian thinking, isn’t it? Have you told her yet how lucky you think she is? How fortunate? How much she has and ought to be grateful for?” She paused, shivered or shook herself – reproach stopping for a moment at her grave? “Life is a curse,” she said. She sounded mournful, as though she regretted how long it had taken her to come to the truth of this. “As parents, we should probably spend more time than we do apologising to our offspring for inflicting it on them. I often think of a soldier, an adolescent, lying on a battlefield with an indifferent, darkening sky looking down on him. The battle goes on around him, but he's no longer interested in it, nor it in him. He’s dying. He’s lost his legs, and one of his arms, and is bleeding into the mud. He might justifiably ask: Mummy, Daddy, did you have me for this? More pertinently: Should you have had me if you couldn't protect me from this? As with everything we do for entirely selfish reasons, we find a way of giving it a nice, positive, saccharine spin. It’s rather sickening the way we gush approvingly over news of someone having a baby, and nauseating the lively expectation of this gushing approval.”
“You sound bitter on her behalf,” I said. “It’s almost as if you believe – notionally at least – that she existed as she is now in some other pre-natal world, and you betrayed her by bringing her into this one.”
She smiled ruefully. “Yes, I suppose that’s not a bad approximation of how I experience it emotionally. Caroline resents ordinary things and makes me feel guilty for conspiring to inflict them on her. I’d feel better about it if she rebelled, but she just puts up with it. She once told me having to wear school uniform was dressing to please, and was probably good practice for becoming a whore, which I thought showed a subtle and mature understanding of what was being done to her. It’s distasteful to reflect that ultimately we’re engaged in the business of training our children to be useful and attractive to someone else – to be economically useful. After all, a CV’s not so very different from a phone card offering sexual services. We’re not really protecting our children; that’s a lie we tell ourselves to produce that cosy self-righteous feeling we’re so addicted to. Parents are pimps, and society the clientèle. The best protected children are never born.”
“I’m afraid your daughter’s going to kill herself,” I said. I watched a coot disappear under the curtain of a willow tree. “It’s probably deathly dull of me, but I feel I ought to make some sort of effort to stop her. I don’t quite know what or how, though. A girl of her age shouldn’t have the capacity for philosophical despair.”
“I did do something about it,” she said coldly. “I begged her not to. I apologised for bringing her into an ugly world, and begged her to put up with it for my sake. Pathetic, isn’t it? Don’t kill yourself, dear; it would make me and other impotent adults feel quite dreadful. You’re here now, sweetie; you might as well listen while the band plays on. No-one’s forcing you to dance. Well, okay, they are. But could you, please – pretend. Just for Mummy.” Her eyes had filled with tears. “She’s an angel,” she said defiantly; “something other. She’s perfect. She’ll never be better than she is now.”
“Forgive me,” I said, “but that sounds disturbingly like you’ve resigned yourself to her imminent death.
“No, not really,” she replied; “but I’m not going to betray my daughter to anyone. I’m not going to persuade myself I know better, and then spend the rest of my life justifying my shoddy, self-interested actions to myself and others – especially to the kind of people who would support me in them. Oh, yes, you were quite right. Young people are so ungrateful; don’t know what’s good for them, do they? – the assumption always being that we did
them a favour by having them. It wasn’t for us; it was for them. What a horrible inversion of the truth.”
I said, “At the risk of seeming drearily commonsensical, don’t you think you’re being a teensy bit hard on yourself? Your daughter’s a credit to you – an intelligent and thoughtful young woman interested in, and concerned about, the wider world. The vulgar and facile produce unthinkingly every day, and, in our culture, mawkishly celebrate the event. In that context, there’s something rather tragic about someone as thoughtful and sensitive as you reproaching yourself for the existential plight of your offspring.”
She snorted. “Is it really supposed to be a comfort to me that there are morons in the world to whom I can favourably compare myself? I don’t believe that, and I don’t believe you believe that.” We stood for a moment in silence, staring out over the lake. I remember idly wishing I’d brought some bread for the ducks. “Tell me something personal about yourself,” she said gently. She had turned to me, smiling warmly. It transformed her face.
I considered. “I don’t have or want children,” I told her, “and I adore cats. The two things are not related.”
She laughed. Her grey eyes twinkled briefly, fleetingly, and I caught the cutting edge of white teeth, quickly eclipsed – or occluded – by closing lips. The twinkle faded just as quickly. An unkempt man with a florid face and grizzled beard walked by with a can of Special Brew in one hand and a roll-up cigarette in the other. He said, “Afternoon, ladies,” in a formal, hearty way, raising the can in salute as he passed.
We replied, “Good afternoon,” in unison, and I wondered at the need – sometimes casual, sometimes desperate, occasionally wretched – to connect with other people. For some, the exchange at the supermarket checkout or post-office counter is all there is, which is, usually, far less than is needed or wanted.
“I’m glad we had a chance to speak,” she said. “Andrea by the way, but you probably already knew that.”
“Barbara,” I said, and we shook hands.
She smiled and said, “I’ll leave you with a cat story, Barbara. When I was a girl, I lived next door to a quiet boy called Tom, who lived alone with his mother. He spent most of his time reading, and showed no interest in making friends. Despite performing better than average at school, his mother and the school worried about him. A boy his age – he was twelve – should have friends. It was unnatural his lack of interest in other people. The only creature that excited any display of affection from him was an overweight tabby cat that belonged to someone who lived across the road. The someone had a gran who liked to make her own chips while on babysitting duty, and Gran was about to become the kind of statistic the fire brigade have campaigns about. In short, she set the house on fire. We watched it burn. Then we saw Tom go into the house. We thought he’d gone mad, but he emerged a minute or so later – with a baby in one arm and pillow case with something in it hanging from his free hand. Tom casually passed the baby over to a woman – who shouted something like, “Oh, you wonderful boy,” – then he crossed the road, still holding the pillow case. He put it down gently in his own front garden, and a fat tabby cat sloped out. It made the local newspaper. Tom was pictured standing next to his proud mother. Saved baby and relieved and happy mother were also pictured with Tom. Neither Gran, who died later in hospital from smoke inhalation, nor the cat got a look in. The neighbourhood kids knew what none of the adults wanted to hear – that Tom had gone into the burning building to save the cat. My mother would laugh and shush me whenever I mentioned it. Saving the baby had been an afterthought. If he’d had to choose between the baby and the cat, he’d have saved the cat. It’s been making me smile for years. I hope we meet again, Barbara, but not for a while.” I watched her back as she walked away. Rain, I thought, suited her. So did smiling.
