‘Only if you’re found out,’ Emily murmured. ‘She was young. We all did things we regret.’ Jack didn’t imagine Emily doing many things she regretted. She radiated goodness. Bella would take no prisoners.
Bella drew her shawl around herself, speaking without apparent bitterness. ‘I was a bitch when we were kids, wasn’t I, Em?’ she chirped happily. Jack was getting to like Bella.
‘You were unhappy,’ Emily said placidly. ‘Chrissie was made of tougher stuff than you.’
‘You were unhappy, but you didn’t take it out on anyone.’ Bella swapped her empty glass for a full one from the tray offered by a waiter.
‘I didn’t know I was unhappy, I thought my life was normal.’
‘Normal? Your mother kept trying to kill herself – how was that normal?’
‘One gets used to anything.’ Emily too accepted a glass of champagne from the waiter.
The crowd was thinning as people began to drift away. Jack couldn’t see Stella. He wasn’t being a support. Or perhaps he was, because he was talking to women who had known Tina as a child.
Emily said, ‘Chrissie had come from another school. Children find that disruptive. She had lost her friends and everything was strange. She had to find her feet.’
‘I was the boss and then along comes this girl who insisted on being in charge. I was well put out!’ Bella’s eyes glittered.
Jack knew how cruel children could be; he had been on the end of cruelty at school and he had meted it out. He suspected that Bella would be as put out now were her position in a group to be threatened.
‘It never occurred to me that Chrissie would lie,’ Emily said. ‘My parents lied to each other, and to us kids, on a daily basis so I don’t know why it didn’t. Chrissie was the most straightforward of us all. Despite the lies, I knew where I was with her. She wore her pain on her sleeve.’
‘I asked for proof that those people were her parents and what does she do?’ Bella flicked a finger against her champagne glass, making it ring. No one spoke as the sound died away. ‘She nicks a locket thingy and passes it off as her parents.’ Full marks for front!’
‘Tina was at a new school with new rules. She found a survival strategy. Ultimately we were all trying to survive.’ Emily seemed to have tolerance for every transgression. Jack found it tiring. He wondered what got Emily riled. ‘I expect she was given the locket.’
‘You’re too nice, Emily,’ Bella retorted. ‘Everyone loved you; you couldn’t put a foot wrong.’ Jack noted an edge to her voice. He saw the Bella who had been unkind to her friends. The tiredness went.
‘I learnt to be a bystander. Head down, keep out of trouble. Hardly admirable.’ Jack noticed that Emily hadn’t touched her champagne.
Stella had silently witnessed her parents’ rows, but she wasn’t a bystander. If there was trouble, she would roll up her sleeves and face it. Jack scoured the gallery: only a few knots of people remained, mostly in the little antechamber where the body had been. Stella wasn’t in the gallery. She had gone without telling him. She wouldn’t do that.
‘She did once tell me a secret.’ Emily was serious suddenly.
The back of Jack’s neck tingled. This was what he had been waiting for.
‘I love hearing secrets.’ Bella’s eyes gleamed. So did Jack’s, but he kept quiet.
‘I shouldn’t say anything, especially since Chrissie’s no longer with us,’ Emily murmured. ‘She told me in confidence.’
Jack felt a burst of anger. Emily was too nice. Give him the Bellas of this world, who wore their darkness on their sleeves, any day. Stella would agree with Emily about confidence though. Stella heard her clients’ secrets about broken relationships, jobs they hated, affairs and more serious transgressions, and, unlike him – because he told her – never told a soul.
‘If I had been there, Chrissie would have told us both.’ Bella lifted a glass of champagne from another tray. She hadn’t finished the previous one.
‘I don’t think she saw it as lying. Chrissie believed her stories. She was trying to fit in.’ Emily gave Jack a tight smile. She had sensed his anger towards her. ‘I assumed it was a lie at the time, but after we saw Chrissie recently, I realized she was probably telling the truth.’
Bella said, ‘Get it off your chest, Ems. Look after the living’s my motto; we can’t help Chrissie now.’
Good one, Bella. Jack could have hugged her.
Emily spoke so softly that Jack and Emily had to lean in to hear: ‘She said she saw the Cat in the Hat carrying a box with the Two Things.’
‘Is that it?’ Bella mussed up her hair with frustration. ‘For goodness’ sake, Ems, that’s obviously a lie!’
Emily’s face was pale, almost ghostly against the rich colours of the paintings. ‘It wasn’t all. Chrissie told me that she had seen a murder.’
Chapter Forty-Three
November 2014
‘My daughter said you was her best friend. Was she yours?’ Tina’s father looked searchingly at Stella. Pleading even.
Her mind whirled. She didn’t know if Tina had been her best friend; nor did she know she had been Tina’s best friend. She should say yes because Tina’s dad wanted her to and it would do no harm. But she couldn’t lie. ‘She taught me to foxtrot.’
‘You got that wrong!’ He was adamant. ‘She couldn’t dance. And she refused to let me teach her.’ Stella was familiar with clients rejigging the character of a loved one to suit their memory. Cliff Banks had spent the last fifteen minutes boasting about Tina’s success in the law courts. Dancing didn’t fit the profile. She had to agree there.
‘I need some air. Fancy a stroll?’ he asked her.
Stella didn’t, but couldn’t refuse. She looked around for Jack to tell him what she was doing, but couldn’t see him. He might have left. She hesitated, scanning the crowd. Jack wouldn’t leave without telling her.
Banks led her along the path away from the Marianne North Gallery, deeper into the gardens. The air was cold and crisp, the lawns pale green in the fading light. She was relieved she had kept her anorak on.
‘Chrissie said she could talk to you.’ Cliff Banks stopped beneath a crumbling arch and lit a cigarette. In the brief flare of the match, he looked a much younger man, more like the man in the photograph on Tina’s living-room window sill. ‘I’m glad she had you.’ He shook the match out. He touched it with the tip of his finger and, having ascertained it was cold, dropped it in his pocket. Stella was relieved that he hadn’t thrown it on the ground; she would have felt bound to pick it up.
‘I talked to her too.’ Stella was thankful to be able to say something that was true. It was dawning on her that she would miss the conversations about employment policies, cleaning equipment, accounting programmes, with Tina protesting that Stella undercharged her clients. ‘They see you coming.’
‘I bet you girls exchanged secrets!’ Cliff Banks gave a harsh laugh. ‘Chrissie was a great one for mates. She told me that she had loads of friends at school. She was in charge. My Chrissie was always the boss!’ He veered off the path and with gazelle-like ease – he must have been in his sixties – clambered up a slope. Stella had no choice but to follow. She balked at a length of orange plastic tape that cordoned off the top of the arch: she wouldn’t trespass.
‘Tina told me your dad’s passed.’ Cliff Banks was pacing along the loose brickwork. The surface was tufted with rough grass and scattered with stones. Stella wished he would come back; the cordon was there for a reason.
‘Yes.’ Stella didn’t want to talk about Terry. She found the phrase ‘passed’ peculiar. Passed what? He didn’t appear to hear her.
‘This was a way out of Kew a long time ago. It took you over the road, no waiting for a break in the traffic. Horse and carts in them days. Chrissie told me. Mine of information.’ He drew on his cigarette; the tip glowed in the receding light. ‘When a person dies all they ever learnt goes too. That’s mad, isn’t it.’ His speech trembled.
‘Yes.’ Stell
a was stumped for a reply.
Orange street lighting on Kew Road drifted over the high wall, picking out leaves and branches in high relief. Stella wished Tina were here to handle her dad. But then if she’d been here, he wouldn’t need handling. He’d be driving his taxi and Tina would be working. And so would she.
‘We were born on the same day. She called us twins,’ she blurted out. Then she reeled at her mistake. Was it tactless to talk about Tina’s birth date when she was dead? Or to emphasize that she herself was still alive?
‘Friday’s child is loving and giving.’ Cliff Banks blew smoke towards the sky. ‘That was Chrissie.’ His voice cracked. ‘Are you loving and giving?’
‘I don’t know.’ Stella hadn’t thought about herself in such terms. Or Tina.
‘Spect you are.’ He smiled at her kindly. ‘Bet your dad was proud of you. Thing is, Stell, you girls have no idea what us blokes go through to keep you safe. Get you on in life.’ He sucked on his cigarette, grimacing with the effort. ‘I can hear her voice, but I can’t see her face. Can you see her face?’
A tall tree formed a canopy over the arch. In the half-light Stella saw a label on the trunk: ‘Eucalyptus gunnii’. She stopped herself exclaiming. It was the tree in the drawing by George Watson. Jack’s words came back to her.
‘There’s a eucalyptus above the Ruined Arch beyond the North Gallery... The bark is beautifully smooth. It’s one of my favourite trees.’
‘Do you mean...?’ Was he talking about a ghost?
‘Thing is, I’m frightened of forgetting her, Stella. The more you tell me about her, the more she’ll be here. Know what I mean?’
Suddenly Stella realized that she did know what he meant.
*
Approaching the tree, stepping on sheaths of old bark splayed around the base, she touched the trunk and, as Jack had said, it was smooth, as if it had been planed flat.
‘...when did he die? Your dad.’ Banks lifted the tape off an iron stake and beckoned her through as if to a crime scene. She stumbled forward. He replaced the cordon after her.
Stella’s mind went blank. When did Terry die: 2011, 2012? Sometimes it was as though he had died long ago, others only yesterday. ‘January 2011,’ she said finally.
‘Bet you was poleaxed.’
Stella didn’t remember being poleaxed. She did remember the drive to the hospital in Sussex. She remembered the procedure for probate and the funeral. ‘It was sudden,’ she said.
‘Like my Chrissie. Gone just like that.’ He paced about on uneven ground beneath a tree. A holm oak (Quercus ilex), Stella noticed irrelevantly. Soon it would be dark; they should go. Banks was above the arch, scouring the ground.
‘Have you lost something?’ Jack would say Banks had lost his daughter. She wished she’d brought Jack with her. He was better at grief stuff.
Cliff Banks didn’t appear to have heard because when he spoke it was with another question. ‘She tell you she was ill?’ He faced her, a shadowy figure in the gathering twilight.
‘No.’ Jackie said people tried to gather up the moments of a loved one’s life from everyone who had known them. As if, like Humpty Dumpty, they could try to put them back together again. Stella couldn’t tell him about Tina’s lie about the locket and he hadn’t wanted to hear about her dancing. Tina had said he was the star of the Hammersmith Palais in the fifities. Stella guessed that Banks would have liked to teach his daughter to foxtrot. She guessed he was very good at it.
‘Odd she never said nothing about it. Seeing as you’re mates? She told the girls she was at school with. I just spoke to one called Emily.’
‘If I was ill I wouldn’t tell anyone.’ This was true. Stella would do exactly what Tina had done. She would tell no one and get on with beating the cancer. She hadn’t imagined Tina keeping in touch with school friends; she had never spoken about her past.
‘She was my life.’ He made a choking sound. The tip of his cigarette darted like a firefly against the orange-mauve sky. ‘You sure she didn’t talk to you? You might as well say, it can’t get worse than it is.’
Tiny stones from the crumbling parapet trickled down the slope and scattered on the path below. They were metres from rush-hour traffic beyond the wall, yet it might be remote countryside.
Stella cast about for a way of suggesting they leave. If he broke down entirely she would not know what to do. Anything would sound banal in the face of his terrible loss.
‘She could be watching us now,’ he said. ‘You feel it?’
‘Er...’ Stella didn’t relish the idea that Tina was watching her. If she was, at least she would see that Stella was looking out for her dad. Tina would have looked out for Terry, she was suddenly sure.
‘The dead know everything about us. No secrets,’ Mr Banks stated. Smoke curdled around his head. She couldn’t see his face, but was sure that he was crying. She considered texting Jack to come and help, but that was absurd.
‘If she is watching, that might be nice.’ That was a lie. She hoped Terry wasn’t watching.
He came towards Stella; with each step more stones loosened and tumbled down the slope. ‘She give you anything? A keepsake?’ He tripped and pitched sideways towards the parapet. Stella grabbed his hand and yanked him back, just keeping her own balance. For a moment they held each other. Stella fought back her own tears.
‘That was close! Thanks, Stell,’ he gasped, brushing himself down. Stepping away from her, closer to the edge of the parapet, he stamped out his cigarette on the ground then, picking it up, put it in the same pocket as the match. Tina must have got her attention to detail from her dad.
Stella took charge. ‘Mr Banks, we should come away from here. The gardens will be closing soon. It’s getting dark.’ Mr Banks had admired Tina for her leadership ability. Jackie said people who had lost a loved one tended not to be the full shilling. Her own world had been tilted on its axis.
‘Cliff.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Call me Cliff.’
They returned down the slope. Cliff Banks ducked into an alcove under the arch that Stella had missed on the way up. Inside a greenish light filtered through a grille in the roof. Through it Stella could see the sky. Cliff Banks must have been looking through it when he was on top of the arch.
‘I hoped she had given you something.’ In the cramped stone chamber his voice was strangely intimate. Stella’s hand caught the wall; the stone was damp and slimy. Recoiling, she moved closer to him. For a moment, she wished with a dreadful intensity that Cliff Banks’s daughter was alive and that Terry was here too.
‘She didn’t tell me she was ill,’ Stella reminded him. She didn’t know why she hadn’t told him about the contents of the Boots bag. Tina hadn’t said it was a secret, but somehow Stella thought that it was.
‘She didn’t say anything to you? Give you any clue?’
Would Terry have gone on to her friends like this if it were she who had died and he who was left? Stella was positive that he would. ‘I didn’t know she was ill until she was in the hospice.’ It was truly dark. The temperature had dropped to freezing and Stella’s ears ached. She wished she had her woolly hat, but of course she hadn’t worn it to the funeral.
‘Soon I won’t be able to hear her voice. I can’t hear my wife now. It’s all a blank.’ He got out another cigarette and put it between his lips. He made no effort to light it.
Even in the increasing darkness, Stella had the impression of an old man. Beaten. Defeated. ‘She told me nothing. I suppose that’s how she wanted it. That we wouldn’t feel sorry for her, treat her differently.
Determinedly Stella set off along the path, relieved when he followed her. Banks’s breathing was rasping and, feeling bad, she slowed down. On the rare occasion that she was out with Terry, she had not slowed her pace for him. If Cliff Banks had a heart attack, Tina would never forgive her.
‘Tina has died.’
At the Marianne North Gallery they stopped in light spilling on to the path from the porch.
&nb
sp; ‘She didn’t give me anything.’ Cliff Banks’s eyes glistened with tears. ‘She left her estate to Michelle. That’s how it should be, but I hoped for something. Stupid, isn’t it? Something of my Crystal.’ He forced a grin.
Out of nowhere, Stella saw Terry on the day they moved to Barons Court. He had stood on the kerb, not invited into the new flat, staring at Stella. If she died, he would grill everyone she knew for details of her last moments. What would she leave him? She could only think of Stanley. But he would go to Jack. She roused herself: ‘It’s not stupid. Thing is Tina didn’t plan to die. Or I’m sure she’d have thought of something for you.’ It was a weak response. Mentally she rifled the contents of the Boots bag. Objects that she didn’t associate with Tina, that she wondered if had even belonged to her.
He smiled at her. ‘Nothing will bring her back.’ His eyes were exactly like Tina’s eyes, blue flecked with green. Stella hadn’t noticed the similarity when she had seen Tina with her dad in her flat. She had the disturbing notion that they were Tina’s eyes and that she was watching.
‘You visited her when she was ill. She say anything?’
‘I want you to catch a murderer!’
‘She said something about a cat in a hat.’ There had been no deathbed confession, no wise words for the living. Tina had been out of her head on painkillers.
‘What?’
‘She recited street names. She was rambling.’
‘Say again?’
‘“Forward Hammersmith Road, Forward Hammersmith Broadway, Left Butterwick, Right Talgarth Road.”’ She remembered some of the streets because she had clients in all of them, except for Butterwick, which was a bus station.
‘She wasn’t rambling.’ His voice was disembodied in the dark.
‘Well, no, I—’ He must think she was being disrespectful of his daughter.
‘It’s Run twenty-seven. One of the runs we have to learn for the Knowledge. She started in the middle, which shows she weren’t herself. When she was a kid, she called over all the runs for me, three hundred and twenty of them. She learnt them all. That one starts with “Leave on left Addison Road, Right Kensington High Street, Forward Addison Bridge”.’ Reciting the streets seemed to calm him.
The House With No Rooms Page 26
