Copyright © 2019 Stephen Baddeley
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
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For Rebecca.
Contents
Prologue
Part One
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Nine
Forty
Forty-One
Forty-Two
Forty-Three
Part Two
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Nine
Forty
Forty-One
Forty-Two
Forty-Three
Forty-Four
Forty-Five
Forty-Six
Forty-Seven
Forty-Eight
Forty-Nine
Fifty
Fifty-One
Fifty-Two
Fifty-Three
Fifty-Four
Fifty-Five
Prologue
It was agreed. My voice started the first book. You may know that. So, it was agreed, it was reasonable, Annie’s should start this book. Then I had doubts. That’s what this Prologue is about.
This is not a happy book. You should be warned about that. Warned before you start it. Then you may not want to. Then you may decide not to.
There are people in this book you may already know. Some you may already like. If this is the first time you meet them, I hope you grow to like the likeable ones. The things that are going to happen to the people you may already like, or may come to like, are not nice things to happen to anyone. What is also a ‘not nice thing’ about this book is that, some of the ‘not nice things’ that happen, are permanent things. The nice people who have those ‘not nice things’ happen to them, will never recover from them.
There are unpleasant people, bad people, in this book. You may know them already. I said at the end of the last book that the bad people would get their comeuppance one day. But sadly, life doesn’t work that way, and bad people don’t always get the comeuppance they deserve. But they do, ‘sort of’, in a funny sort of way. That’s the reality of life. We all know that. Good luck.
Part One
One
I lived, once, with my husband and two daughters in a house on low cliffs overlooking the Arafura Sea. The girls looked like me, but were more like him, in so many ways.
We were happy then.
We weren’t always happy before then. We wouldn’t always be happy after then.
That’s what this story is about, I suppose. Only happiness, mixed with sadness, makes a story worth telling and worth reading, I suppose. So this is a story about sad times, that came after happy times, that were the first happy times Tommy ever knew. But they weren’t happy times for me, not at the start. If you’ve read the first book you may know that already. If you haven’t, you’ll pick it up as we go along.
Now, back to the present. Well, not the present present, but the present in the past, telling it as it is, when really we’re telling it as it was. All of us, telling it as it is, when really we’re telling it as it was. Telling about that time in the past when the good things were happening, and before the bad things started happening again.
Two
A lot of this story is about us, about me, my name’s Tom, about Annie, Ambrosia and the girls. About other people too.
This story is about the things that happened to us. About the good things that happened to us. Then about the bad things that happened to us. After we thought the bad things that happened, before, were the last bad things that were ever going to happen, to any of us.
I didn’t expect the bad things, that were about to happen, to happen. That was because I didn’t think they were going to happen.
All of our lives are full of things that happen that we don’t think will happen, or when we think they might. They happen like that all the time. Things in my childhood happened like that. Things in my future were going to happen like that. Things in all our futures were going to happen like that. That’s what this story is about.
We don’t have control over what happens in our lives, over how what happens happens, or over when what happens happens. We all know that. Maybe we don’t know that as children, but we soon find out.
When we won. When Karlsberg hanged himself. When the truth came out. When I did
n’t go to jail. When Prouse escaped. When Ambrosia was my friend. When no one knew where Annie was. When I didn’t care where Annie was. When I didn’t care what happened to her. Then, when we found her crucified and mutilated. Then, when we saved her. Then, when, even after we saved her, I still didn’t care for her. Then, when Ambrosia talked to me. Then, when Pip talked to me. Then, because of all the things they said to me, I realised I did care for her, still cared for her, always cared for her. That I just forgot that I did. That I just pretended that I didn’t. That I remembered just in time.
It was then that I thought we were safe. It was then that I thought it was over. But…
The ‘But…’ was a voice that spoke to me from my deep twilight places. It was my other self who spoke. The self who glowed in the dark. The self I didn’t like. The dark, mean, nasty, ugly and horrible self that no one could like. The self who screamed out for vengeance. I didn’t tell Annie about that voice.
From deep inside me, another voice spoke and told me it wasn’t over. Told me that things were just beginning and that the bad times we survived were just the start of the really bad times that were to come. I ignored that voice. The more I ignored it, the louder it spoke. I didn’t tell Annie about that voice either.
Three
We still have Henry and Maggie, Tommy’s cocker-spaniels, and now we have five chickens. One of them has stopped laying, but we don’t know which one. The chickens don’t come into the story again, so I’m not sure why I mention them.
You may know that I’m older than him, almost ten years, so, perhaps he keeps me young. Perhaps I make him old, but I don’t think I do, and I certainly hope I don’t. He was just a boy when I met him, and he still seems so young.
You may know that our first year was a difficult time, but that it all worked out in the end. I fell in love with him, but didn’t notice that I had. It just snuck up on me, and then exploded in my face. I did him a lot of damage before the explosion happened and I thought he might never recover from it, but he seems to have. He seems to be back to the soft, gentle Tommy he was before I hurt him. I made him hard, brutal and uncaring, but that all went away, thank God.
I’m not religious. Atheists, like me, say ‘thank God’ even though we don’t mean it. We don’t mean a lot of the things we say. You don’t either.
We say ‘bless you’, when people sneeze, but we don’t know how to ‘bless’ and even if we did, we wouldn’t bother.
We say ‘see you later’, to people we know we won’t, and sometimes to people we hope we won’t.
We say ‘how do you do?’, to people we hope won’t tell us, because we’re not in the slightest bit interested.
Does that say something about me, about us, most of us, all of us? I think it might.
But it doesn’t say things about Tommy, because when Tommy says ‘how do you do?’, he means it. He likes to know ‘how people do’, because he’s interested in ‘how people do’. I think it’s because he spent so much of his early life alone. There was only Mother, and when Mother died he imploded, exploded inwards. He shrank away from the little bits of normality he’d managed to scrape together. He was nineteen when she died and had never had a friend, of either sex. He hated his father and his brother and he had good reason to do that. They died too, and that had to be a good thing.
After we first met, and in our first few weeks together, the one good thing I did for him, among all the nasty things I did to him, was to show him that he could meet people and that he could get to know people, and that people weren’t things to be feared, and that he could have friends. So when Tommy found out those things, those things became valuable to him. He cared for those things in a way that I didn’t then, don’t now and don’t think many of us do. Maybe learning things later in life makes those things more valuable, less likely to be taken for granted. It was the one good thing I did, but it didn’t make up for all the other lousy things I did.
No one could have loved the man I turned him into. I turned something soft and beautiful into something coarse and ugly. I felt bad about doing that. But I didn’t realise how strong he was or how resilient. It surprised me and I think it surprised him too.
I knew he was in love with me, right from the start, from that first day on the beach, from that time when we were naked together, and I knew he wanted to look at my body, but couldn’t. I knew he wanted to look at my body, from the way he looked at my face, and only at my face. There’s a look men get when they meet me on the beach and want to look at my body, but can only look at my face. Tommy didn’t look at my body, because he was a ‘well brought up boy’, and he thought looking at my body wouldn’t be a ‘fine’ thing to do, and Tommy tried to do ‘fine’ things, because he wanted to be a ‘fine’ man, and he wanted to be a ‘fine’ man because his housemaster had asked him to be one. Tommy respected his housemaster and that’s why he wouldn’t look at my body.
What I did to him that day made him fall in love with me, and then, later, made him fall out of love with me, and then into hate with me. Love can turn into hate, if you give it a big enough reason to, and I certainly gave it a big enough reason to. Sometimes it can turn back again too, if you give it a big enough reason to. I don’t think it can turn back for everyone, however good and however big the reason to. It did turn back for us and, I suppose, we were lucky. We were lucky in the end, after all the unlucky bits that had come in between.
We were lucky that he was so forgiving because, after the things I did to him, he needed to be, and if he hadn’t been, our lives would be so different now. I suppose, I would be a blue-stocking art historian spinster living in Florence, and the world’s authority on Piero della Francesca. Tommy would either have returned to his life as a recluse, writing books on Napoleon, or married Ambrosia, who I knew he loved, but not in the same way he loved me. I knew he loved me in some special sort of way, and I knew it right from the start, and because he loved me in that special sort of way, I knew that when he came to fall out of love with me, and then into hate with me, that he would hate me in some special sort of way. I think emotions are like an India rubber ball, the higher they fall, the higher they bounce.
Ambrosia and Pip stopped the bouncing and the hating and showed him the things he needed to know, and the things he wanted to know, but not that he wanted to know them. He didn’t want to hate me, even when he did. He wanted to love me again, but couldn’t, because he couldn’t work out a way to ever do that again, not with all the hating getting in the way. Not after all the hating, and not after all the bad things I did to him, and even after he found out about the one good thing I did to undo the bad things I did, it was still hard for him to love me again.
It was all very complicated back then, but somehow it worked itself out alright, in the end. We were lucky that Ambrosia, and then Pip, showed him all the things he needed to know to undo the hate and let the liking back in. They showed him the things that made us lucky, in the end. Thank God they did it. I’m not religious. You know that already.
People say you can’t love two people at the same time, but I know that’s wrong. We can love lots of people at the same time, just in different ways. Tommy loved me and loved Ambrosia too, just in different ways.
Ambrosia and I were in love too, that was for sure. It was the Sapphic lust that turned into love, and when that happened, no one had to tell us, we knew. I told her I was in love with her, and she said she was in love with me too, so it was the same for both of us, the same, but different.
It wasn’t the same when I fell in love with Tommy, because when I fell in love with Tommy, I didn’t know that I had, and there was no one around to tell me that I had. I only found out later that I was in love with him, almost when it was all too late. Ambrosia knew I was in love with him before I did. She told me I was, but I didn’t want to believe her. I did in the end, but by then it was all too late, well, almost all too late.
There are some things we
can be certain of and there are some things we can’t. I know, for certain, Tommy loves me as much as he ever did. He isn’t a good actor, and what you see is what is, what’s real.
I would have known straight away if Tommy was pretending to love me.
Acting and lying are almost the same thing, I suppose. I’ve always been a good actress and that’s why telling Tommy all those lies came so easily to me.
Tommy told me about a lie he’d once told to get out of trouble with his father, and that he hadn’t felt guilty about telling it. I think he felt guilty, not about telling the lie, but about not feeling guilty about having told it. He knew that telling the lie wasn’t a fine thing to do and I think he only told me about it in a search for absolution. He told me, because there was no one else to tell, and no one else to act as Virgil to his Dante, no one else to lead him through the circles of morality, no one else after his mother died.
So he went by what his housemaster had told him, by what his mother had told him, and by what his mind told him were the right things to do. His mind was a strange mind, maybe even a bit of a weird mind, but it was a smart mind and a decent mind and that’s what made him the man I fell in love with, and the man I almost destroyed.
But not all of Tommy was good and decent, because there was a deep-down dichotomy to him, and perhaps that goes for all of us. There was something deep down inside Tommy that no one could ever have fallen in love with. That was the hating, vengeful, violent part of him. When I first met him, I couldn’t see that part of him. It wasn’t that he was hiding that part of him, because he didn’t know about that part of him either. It was only after I did the nasty things I did to him, that that part of him rose up out of his deep places. I think it surprised him, as much as it did me, to find that there was that part to him.
When he forgave me and after the bad times, the first lot of bad times, went away and after he fell in love with me again and after we got married and Ambrosia had our daughters, those parts of him disappeared back into his deep places, but they weren’t to stay there. That’s what a lot of this story is about. About what happened when the hateful, vengeful, violent parts of him rose up again from his deep, dark places and dominated all of our lives.
A Judgement on a Life Page 1
