by Mel McGrath
Honor takes a step towards him. She has been hoping not to have to say the unsayable. All these years she has kept the secret from her daughter because she was afraid that it might kill her. But Christopher has left her with no choice. There is no other route out of this. Telling the secret might be the only way to save her now.
‘Look at Nevis, Christopher.’ Mulholland glances at the figure beside him. ‘Look at her jawline, her eyes, the contours of her mouth. Who does she remind you of?’
Mulholland looks away. She watches his nose twitch, his chin crumple, the implacable look of confidence give way to something more troubled.
‘Nevis, tell Christopher who Zoe Jeffers was.’ Believe me, she thinks, this is not how I wanted to tell you, this is not what I’d planned.
There is confusion scribbled on his face.
In a tremulous voice Nevis says, ‘Zoe was my birth mother.’
‘And when were you born?’
Nevis splutters out the date.
Honor watches Mulholland’s eyes turn inwards. He blinks and checks himself, then turns his head and stares at Nevis.
The air is thrumming now. A helicopter nearing.
‘What’s going on?’ Nevis says, in a pleading voice this time.
‘Tell her, Christopher.’
Mulholland doesn’t speak. She watches the rifle go slack in his hands. The thrum has become an insistent buzz now.
‘It makes no difference,’ he says, his voice hoarse with pain. ‘The only person that ever mattered to me was Zoe.’ Turning his face to Nevis he bellows, ‘How could you betray your only true mother? This woman, this pretend mother, has brainwashed you. There is no honour in this woman…’ he is pointing now. ‘Only envy. Your mother didn’t die in the way you think she did. This woman killed her.’
Nevis blinks and swallows hard, turning first to Mulholland and then to her mother. Honor watches her begin to shake, her shoulders fold in on themselves. The fingers of her right hand come up to her mouth as the words form, too terrible to say out loud.
The silence between them is thick and murky. Who will break it? What is there to say? A howl starts up and becomes a roar. Nevis rising to her full height now, her teeth glinting in the moonlight. Mulholland tightens his grip on the rifle.
Honor takes a breath in. She thinks, now is the time. If not now, then never. She sees Nevis staring at her, trying to make sense of Mulholland’s words and, opening her mouth, she says, ‘Remember the kingfisher, my darling, when she left the Ark, turned blue by the water and orange by the sunrise. She was the first, the bravest.’
The sun will rise here too. There will be a new day, a new beginning.
The ’copter is shaking the tops of the trees.
Is that the sound of sirens in the distance?
And then, in a flash, it happens. From the tracks comes a roar as Nevis launches herself through the dusty blue air and at the enemy. Her feet jam into Mulholland’s belly. He buckles then stumbles back over the railway track, arms windmilling in space, his legs twisting under him. Honor sees the spark as the barrel of the rifle hits the tracks, hears a thud and the unmistakeable crack of bone snapping on metal as Mulholland goes down. For a moment Mulholland reels yelping in pain and reaching for the rifle tries to stand and then Honor, leaping towards the prostrate figure, kicks his damaged leg from under him. He goes down again. She steps forward and, raising her boot, stamps down hard on his rifle arm. Mulholland roars with pain and loosens his grip on his weapon. In a split second Honor lunges forward and kicks the gun away and, catching her foot on the side of her leg, sways and feels herself falling, seeing the earth coming up towards her, swinging her body and landing with a thud just shy of the tracks. Again Mulholland tries to stand but the broken leg hangs from his hip like a used paper bag and, as he struggles to get his balance, Honor scrambles forwards on all fours and grabbing the rifle with one hand pushes herself to stand. Fighting the urge to be sick, she lifts the weapon in her arms so that it is primed on Mulholland. How much of her life has been leading up to this moment.
‘You have no idea how to use that,’ Mulholland says.
‘Try me.’ She smiles to herself. As a girl, she was taught by Jim how to shoot the rats that hung around the Traveller encampments. Said it was kinder than laying down traps or poison. A girl doesn’t forget the lessons of her father.
Nevis is standing just behind her. She reaches back behind her, feels the tips of Nevis’s fingers reach out to touch her, says, ‘My brave girl. Are you OK?’
No reply.
Without taking her eyes off Mulholland, she moves her body and out of the corner of her eye sees her daughter, struggling to catch her breath, a haunted expression on her face.
‘What he said, just now, I want you to know it’s not true.’
Nevis compresses her lips and turns her head to the sky, watching for the helicopter. Confused and in a state of shock, Honor thinks, and who can blame her for that. For herself, though, there has never been a time when her mind was more clear, more settled, more determined on its course.
To Mulholland she says, ‘We’re going for a stroll.’
The man lets out a groan and shakes his head, his hand going to his twisted, hopeless leg. She watches him panting from the pain.
Her voice strangely calm now, she says, ‘Get up.’
Chapter 56
Honor
He staggers onto his one good leg, hand grasping the air for the support that isn’t there, skin slick, eyes rolling wildly in his head. He knows he is defeated now, she thinks, but he’ll not go down cleanly. He cannot physically destroy her now but he will do everything to deprive her of her reason to live. She must be alert to his tricks, that keen intelligence which once, many years ago, she almost admired. She holds the rifle to his back and directs him to the far side of the railway track near the lip of the cliff, Nevis following on behind and crying out, ‘Where are we going?’
Her daughter’s voice sounds very distant, as though it were reaching her from the past, the way a star’s light beams down from centuries ago.
‘Not far.’
The voice again, more insistent this time. An edge to it. ‘I don’t think we should go any further. We should wait for the police.’
They come to a standstill, Mulholland quiet now, his shoulders shaking, his breathing laboured. She is surprised by how little pity she has for him.
‘Move to the edge,’ she says. ‘Take a good look over.’ She waits for him to comply. ‘It’s a long drop into the night. You’re going to feel it.’
He grimaces, a small, strangled laugh escaping from his lips. ‘I stopped feeling a long time ago. It didn’t agree with me.’
‘Then you won’t mind.’
‘Not really, though I would have preferred to do it on my own terms.’ From under hooded lids his eyes go to Nevis. ‘Your daughter might, though. Only she’s not really your daughter, is she?’ His eyes close and his body slumps like an emptied sack. ‘If she belongs to anyone it’s to me, her father.’
She feels Nevis tense. So, he has worked it out. Done the maths. Well, he is a mathematician. She supposes it’s more surprising in a way that he never found out before, wasn’t curious or just didn’t want to know. Nevis’s soft sobs creep into every corner of her being.
She says, ‘It’ll be all right, darling, I promise.’ This is not how Honor wanted her daughter to find out, not something she ever wanted her to know. He will pay for this too. Taking a step closer to him, she says, ‘Turn and face me and keep your hands where I can see them.’
He hops about, unsteady on his one good leg, and stares at her, his face growing dark and waxy as if he were already slipping into death.
Tilting his head in Nevis’s direction, he says, ‘Why did you never tell her?’
‘Because she didn’t need to know.’
The ticking of the ’copter blades, a thickening throb in the ear.
She watches him slump as if defeated then think better of it, straight
ening himself upright, a last act of defiance.
Honor flicks her eyes skywards. ‘They’re coming for you, but you know that,’ she says to Mulholland. ‘Men who murder their mothers don’t do too well in prison.’
He does not answer.
‘This is a way out,’ she says. ‘A way to escape the shame.’
‘How funny.’ He laughs, bleakly, until the laugh hits pain and fizzles out. ‘That’s what I said to Natasha.’
‘You’re a monster.’
His face twitches and he shakes his head. ‘They knew what they were getting into. All three of them. A pact with the devil.’ His eyes go from Honor to Nevis and back again. ‘And here I am.’
Silence falls. Beside her Nevis appears frozen. As for Honor, she can no longer distinguish between the whump of the ’copter and her own heart. He has said it, finally. It is said.
All around them the trees sway in the downdraught. Soon the ’copter will be overhead again. She wants this over with.
‘Two steps back. You won’t see it coming,’ she says.
His bad foot taps the ground. He shifts his weight just long enough to take a half step backwards towards the cliff, roars with the pain and falls to his hands and knees. Yes, crawl you bastard.
A voice shouts, ‘Wait!’ Nevis raises a hand. ‘How is this man my father? How?’
Mulholland is looking up at Nevis, his breath short and laboured. ‘They kept me from you, Nevis. She…’ he points to Honor, ‘…kept me from knowing anything about you. Couldn’t stand to have a rival for your mother’s affections on the scene.’
‘Affections? Zoe couldn’t stand you,’ snorts Honor, sidestepping closer, the rifle still trained on Mulholland. She reaches out a hand to her daughter and tries not to cry out when Nevis steps away.
The ticking of the ’copter blades fades once more into the night.
Honor feels weak, the rifle suddenly an unbearable burden, something she can barely carry. All the weight she has shouldered, to protect Nevis from exactly this. The thing no child should ever have to know: the knowledge that she only exists because of an act of violence.
Nevis moves her head a quarter turn, eyes blade across, narrow, then return to Mulholland. ‘I found Zoe’s note, the one she wrote before she died. At the end of last summer. You left it in that book of Greek myths, the one you used to read when I was a kid. That’s how I found out you’d been lying to me all these years.’
Honor blinks and swallows, a small muscle in her right eye flickering like a broken light. No wonder Nevis has been so distant. To find out that way. Of course Honor blames herself. It was she who left the letter in the book. Was it carelessness or cowardice? Is there a difference? How can she tell Nevis, now, in the midst of all this? How can she explain? Both of them so young, Zoe depressed, all three holed up in the caravan on the edge of a field, the baby colicky from the damp, by night all three in the same bed, keeping each other warm, by day Honor working shifts in the shitty cafe, no help, too young to know that help was possible.
At the bottom of it all, Mulholland, that malevolent presence. She wants the bastard dead, needs it. In the corner of her eye she sees blue lights flicker across the bridge. Mulholland is propped up on one hand, his bent leg lying limp in front. She could shoot him, but what then? Claim it was self-defence? Against a man who would have been unable to defend himself let alone attack?
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ Nevis cries. ‘Didn’t you think I had a right to know? All these years you telling me my mother died in a traffic accident, that she didn’t even know my father’s name. And now this.’
She holds her breath and swallows but the blood is screaming in her veins. ‘I did it to protect you. Maybe that was wrong. Your mother loved you, Nevis.’
‘Not enough to hang around.’
Ahead of them, in the dim light, Mulholland stirs and, seizing his opportunity, shouts, ‘This woman is nothing to you, Nevis. You and I are blood.’
Silence.
Now is the time, Honor thinks. The truth has done its time. It will not be held prisoner any longer. She says, ‘When this man was fifteen, Nevis, he raped your mother.’
Nevis steps back. ‘What?’
Honor goes on to describe what happened that night. Nevis, so still she is almost fading back into the night, stands listening. Mulholland blinks and shakes his head, saying, ‘No, no.’ When she is done, he says, ‘Nevis, listen to your father. Your blood. There was no rape. Never a scrap of evidence. The police dismissed it. That woman…’ with a shaky hand he points at Honor, ‘manipulated Zoe into making a complaint. She was lucky not to have been charged with defamation and wasting police time. If I’d really “raped” Zoe why wouldn’t she have had an abortion?’
Nevis clasps her hands around her head and begins to sob.
Honor swallows, hard, pushing the nausea, the red rage down, down. ‘This is his revenge, Nevis, I hope you can see that. He can’t destroy me so he’s trying to destroy the most precious thing in my life – my connection to my daughter. Zoe wanted you. From the very beginning. She always said you were the best thing that could ever have come out of what had happened.’
‘I loved your mother, Nevis, she was the love of my life. Why else would this woman make these outlandish claims unless it was her intention to keep us divided? It’s what she’s done your whole life. Your mother took her own life, but it was this woman who really killed her. She left Zoe with nowhere to turn and kept you from your father. Well here he is now, and he is telling you, you were born from love.’
Honor gasps at the audacity of it. But how clever he is, to have been able to twist his lies into something that can sound so like the truth. How can she deny her daughter the comfort of his words? How can she insist that there was nothing lovely about Nevis’s conception? The bastard has beaten her. He took Zoe and he will take Nevis if she lets him.
The blue lights have disappeared into the darkness now. If Mulholland is going to die, it will have to be soon. She owes this to Zoe, to Natasha and Satnam and Jessica.
She raises the rifle, sets the stock against the meat of her shoulder, as if she were about to shoot a rat.
She says, ‘Step back, Christopher. End this. If you don’t, I will end it for you.’
‘Go ahead,’ he says, a sharp defiance in his voice.
From somewhere in the trees an owl calls.
She takes a step towards him. The rifle steady against her shoulder, no breath passing through her, absolute focus. I must do this now.
Something on her shoulder, a sudden sharp shock, a feeling of weightlessness as the rifle is ripped from her hands. She freezes, topples, rights herself, cries out in the dark.
The wind whips up, the owl calls again.
A voice cuts through the night, ‘This is for me to do, Mum.’ Nevis is standing between them, breathing hard, the rifle clasped to her chest. She is looking at the prostrate figure on the ground. Addressing herself to Mulholland, she says, ‘If anyone is going to kill you, it’ll be me.’
Mulholland’s voice, flat, almost as if the man has already departed his body. ‘Do you want to throw away your life?’
‘You don’t understand. I am reclaiming it.’
Honor says, ‘Darling, please, he is right. This is our business. Let us finish it.’
Nevis holds up a hand. ‘I’m not doing this for you, or for me. This is for Natasha and Jessica and Satnam.’
For a moment Honor is stunned into silence. She opens her mouth to speak and in that instant realises that Nevis is right. This is not her business. It never was. Her spite, her rage, everything she has felt about Mulholland over the past decades, all this has taken up precious space in her heart where it had no business being. A piece of herself closed off and unavailable. She has never been completely and wholly present. An absence in her own life. And in her daughter’s. A small dense ball of shame rises up and in its place a rush of release.
She hears Mulholland bleating, ‘I loved your mother.’
‘I was young. It wasn’t like that.’
‘I choose to believe Honor, my other mother.’
Folding his good leg under himself, and pushing off the ground with his hands, growling in pain, Mulholland rises to a stand. ‘One last time, I beg of you to think again.’
Nevis braces herself. ‘I’m done thinking.’
A ragged silence falls.
From somewhere nearby the owl hoots again. Mulholland says, ‘Please forgive me,’ and in a flash he has wheeled about and is rushing towards the lip of the cliff, roaring in pain as his broken femur bears his weight. From the corner of her eye she sees Nevis raise the rifle’s sight to her eye. Honor hears herself cry out.
The roar becomes a scream as Mulholland goes over.
The whump of the helicopter rotors grows louder. Nobody hears Mulholland’s last moments in this world.
She watches Nevis gasp and, head in hands, crumple to the ground. The rifle drops and clatters as it lands. Rushing over and falling to her knees, Honor clasps her arms around her daughter. The wind from the rotors sweeps their bodies and lifts the hair from their scalps but they remain, each holding the other. A voice from a loudhailer instructs them to stay in place.
Landing a kiss on her daughter’s head and, feeling her body as it softens into her, Honor says, ‘It’s OK now.’ Nevis swings an arm around her mother’s shoulders and reaches for her hand. And so they huddle together, fingers loosely entwined, and wait for the police.
Chapter 57
Honor
‘I get tired but otherwise, I’m good,’ Satnam says, helping herself to another biscuit. ‘It’s strange to be on the Kingfisher again, but happy strange.’
Honor, Alex, Nevis and Satnam are taking cold lemonade and shortbread in the saloon. They are tied up on the banks of the Avon upstream of the Clifton Suspension Bridge, awaiting a helping tide. It is afternoon and hot, the water of the Floating Harbour a burnished bronze in the late summer sun.
