by Emlyn Rees
‘Oh, sure,’ Ned answered. ‘Clara was such a handful by the time she reached two that I thought I’d better sort myself out with someone to take some of the strain off me … and Debs, well, financially it made sense for her …’
‘But that’s so … so clinical,’ Ellen protested. ‘How can you … and, my God’ – she’d noticed the grin sliding across Ned’s face – ‘you actually think it’s funny …’
Ned stepped away from the car and wolf-whistled at Wobbles, whom he’d just spotted racing around a chugging cement mixer in the distance. ‘I’ll tell you what,’ he suggested to Ellen, ‘why don’t we start that tour of the house I promised you, and I’ll tell you the truth about my oh-so-clinical relationship with Debs on the way?’
With the tour over and Ellen having driven Ned and Wobbles into town, the three of them were now sitting in the Hope and Anchor’s beer garden on the Esplanade, overlooking South Beach.
‘Cheers,’ Ned said, clinking his pint glass of bitter against her glass of gin and tonic. He took a deep, sweet swig. ‘I never thanked you properly,’ he said.
‘For what?’
‘For bringing Clara back.’
‘you did,’ Ellen said. ‘You may not remember it, but you did.’ She narrowed her eyes. ‘A few sentences before you told me that I disgusted you, if my memory serves me right.’
Ned grimaced, embarrassed now. ‘I overreacted,’ he said. ‘And I’m sorry.’
But Ellen was smiling. ‘It’s in the past,’ she said. ‘Forget it.’
Ellen looked down at Wobbles, basking in the late-afternoon sun. ‘Hard to think of him as a savage killer when he’s like that, isn’t it?’
Ned laughed. ‘You’re not still going to sue me, then?’
‘Not so long as you carry on being as nice to me as you have been today.’
‘I guess I don’t have a choice, then, do I?’
The stare between them became awkward and Ned broke it off. He reached into his pocket, got out his tin of tobacco and started to roll a cigarette.
‘So … Scott and Debs …’ Ellen said.
Ned snorted. ‘You’ve got a real mischievous streak to you, you know,’ he commented.
‘Well, they’re both single, aren’t they?’
‘Yep, and aren’t we both a bit old for matchmaking?’ he asked in return.
‘Nah,’ she scoffed, ‘you’re never too old to dabble in romance.’
‘I think it’s for kids. You grow out of it. Life teaches you to.’
He became aware she was scrutinising him. ‘You’re winding me up again, right?’ she checked. ‘I mean, everyone’s romantic at heart, aren’t they?’
Ned lit his cigarette. ‘You want the truth?’
‘The truth.’
‘The truth is I think romance is bullshit.’
He wasn’t sure why he’d told her this, when lying and simply agreeing with her would have been so much easier. Was it because her optimism in relation to affairs of the heart grated against his own experience? Or was it that he already felt closer to her than he wanted to be? Was that why he had this sudden urge to push her away?
‘What about this, then?’ Ellen said, weighing the diary he’d lent her in her hand. She’d been scanning through it on and off since they’d arrived. ‘What about what Caroline Walpole wrote and what she did because of love? You can’t tell me that this isn’t true romance, because it is. To be so in love with someone that you want to spend every waking hour with them … to … to …’ – Ellen flicked to the last page of the diary with writing on it – ‘listen,’ she told Ned, before quoting, ‘… I shall not be without my Leon a moment longer, however, for if kept apart from him I know that I shall die …’ Ellen looked up, her eyes shining with conviction. ‘Well?’ she asked Ned.
‘Well, what?’
‘Well,’ Ellen said, gently closing the diary. ‘That entry was dated 21st April 1871.’
‘The same night that Leon betrayed Caroline and she killed herself,’ Ned worked out for himself.
‘Exactly,’ Ellen said. ‘Those were probably the last words Caroline Walpole ever wrote …’
‘And?’
Ellen growled with frustration over Ned’s lack of reaction. ‘And they’re exceptional, of course!’ she exclaimed. ‘The emotions in this diary are enriching and real. To want to die if you can’t have someone … I mean, it’s incredible. It’s romantic to its core. Admit it.’
But Ned wasn’t being drawn. It was as if the more she tried to convince him of the life-enhancing qualities of love and romance, the more he wanted to prove her wrong and show it up for the delusion it was. ‘What’s so worthy about throwing yourself off a cliff and dashing your brains out on the rocks below?’ he asked. ‘And what about the people Caroline left behind, the people who had to live with the consequences of what she’d done? Look what she made her father do to the house. Not to mention to himself …’
‘Forget the house,’ Ellen insisted. ‘What she did was pure, because she did it for love.’
Ned dismissed the idea. ‘Leon Jacobson?’ he said. ‘Some love his turned out to be, that her father could buy it off for a few pounds.’
‘So she was wrong about Leon,’ Ellen protested. ‘But so what? That doesn’t cheapen what she felt, does it? It doesn’t make the power or nobility of her love for him any less.’
‘Not nobility, stupidity,’ Ned retorted. ‘She put her faith in love and she got burnt. The same way everyone always gets burnt. The same as her father did. And that, Ellen, is why romance is bullshit. Because it never works out. Not for real.’ There, he thought. He’d told her now. He’d shown her who he was and now she would leave.
‘What about you, then?’ she asked instead. ‘You’re telling me you’ve never been in love?’
‘I was once,’ he admitted. ‘A long time ago.’
‘And?’
‘And the same as Caroline, I was young enough and dumb enough to think it would last for ever.’
‘But it didn’t,’ Ellen surmised.
‘That’s right.’
‘Who was she?’ Ellen asked after a few seconds’ silence. ‘Clara’s mother?’ she guessed.
‘Her name was Mary,’ Ned said. ‘She was my wife and now she’s dead.’
Ellen nodded. ‘What happened?’ she asked.
The directness of the question took Ned by surprise. People didn’t do that. Whenever people found out his wife had died, they changed the subject, or at best said they were sorry and nothing else. Despite the seriousness of the conversation, Ned allowed himself a rueful smile.
‘What?’ Ellen asked.
‘Nothing.’
‘No, go on, what?’
What he wanted to tell her was that most people were afraid of talking about death. What he wanted to tell her was that her asking him about Mary the way she had done just now made him suddenly realise how much everyone else in his life had been tiptoeing around him since Mary’s death. What he wanted to do was to repay Ellen for her openness, by telling her the truth about how Mary died.
‘Do you really want to know?’ he asked her.
‘Only if you really want to tell me,’ she said.
What he wanted to do more than anything else was to trust her and to believe that she wouldn’t either judge or pity him. But something inside him prevented him. It was as though all the barriers he’d put up these last three years had rusted together and now they wouldn’t budge. And so, instead of the truth, he told her the lies. He told her the same story he’d told Clara when they’d picnicked in the conservatory, all about how Mary had got sick after Clara had been born, and about how she’d died. Because of a brain disease, he told Ellen, a brain disease that had eventually killed her.
Four pints later (three after Ellen had left, called back to the cottage by Scott to help deal with some queries from their London office) Ned was over on South Beach. Black clouds had started to scud across the previously blue sky. Wobbles’s lead hung uselessly in Ned’s h
and, but Wobbles himself was nowhere to be seen. Giant clumps of grass protruded from the dunes like desert islands in a yellow sea, and the same heron that Wobbles had set off after in hot pursuit was now nimbly picking its way across the shallows of the thin estuary which split the beach in two.
‘Wobbles!’ Ned shouted for the fifteenth time – up towards the links course beyond the dunes – but still he got no answer. ‘Stupid bugger,’ Ned muttered, only this time it was to himself.
He cursed again, rubbing furiously at his brow with the palm of his hand. He had a venomous migraine on board. It was slicing through his head every ten seconds like a piece of shrapnel. Served him right, he knew. Getting half drunk, as he was now, well, the migraine came with the territory, didn’t it? He should have gone straight home, not hung around the pub like that on his own after Ellen had left. He should have known better.
But that was him and booze all over, wasn’t it? He never did know better. He never could have just the one drink. He always had to have more. Either don’t go to the pub at all, or go and get so drunk he couldn’t even remember being there: that was Ned’s modus vivendi all right.
Because that was the other thing, wasn’t it? It wasn’t as if he had fun when he got drunk. Sure, the first drink was nice. It gave him a buzz. It made him feel lighter and brighter and happier. But after that it was all downhill, always. Maudlin, that’s what he became. A wall gazer. A frowner. The bloke on his own at the table with a full ashtray and an empty glass.
He looked at his watch. There was probably about another hour of daylight remaining. He’d give Wobbles twenty minutes more to find his way back, before searching further inland for him. He rolled a cigarette, sat down on the cool sand and looked out across the darkening horizon, and smoked. It gave him a sense of perspective, staring out to sea. He liked the feeling of being dwarfed by its vastness. It made him feel insignificant, as though none of the mistakes he’d made in his life mattered.
Then, unaware he’d even slipped it from his wrist, he found himself staring at the inscription on the back of his watch. It had been a Christmas present from his wife, Mary, given to him in the last happy year they’d spent together, the year before she’d got pregnant with Clara. He should have got rid of it, he knew. He should have chucked it out to sea, lobbed it into a canal – stamped on it, pawned it, smashed it, anything – because all it did was remind him of how things had once been between them and how they would be still if she hadn’t done what she had.
The inscription read: To my Darling Edward, With my Love, Today and Always. Always, Ned thought with an automatic shake of his head. She couldn’t have been more wrong if she’d tried.
The story Ned had always told Clara about her mother’s death was a lie. But when she’d first started asking about Mary, he hadn’t known how to tell her the truth. And he didn’t still.
Or perhaps it wasn’t a lie. Perhaps it just wasn’t the whole truth. Perhaps it was simply a sanitised version of events, a story without the details – the details that made the fact of Mary’s death so much worse than it already was.
Today he’d told that same half-truth to Ellen. And now he felt bad about it, bad about lying to yet another new person who’d entered his life, but bad about lying to Ellen in particular, too. What if he hadn’t needed to lie this time? This was the question which plagued him now. What if – as Ellen had given every indication so far – she was more than capable of handling anything he or anyone else had to throw at her?
The whole truth – the one which Ned could spare Clara, but never himself – was this. Mary had got ill after Clara had been born, as Ned had always told Clara. The details were that she’d sunk into a post-natal chemical depression so deep he hadn’t been able to reach her. She hadn’t wanted him and she hadn’t wanted Clara. And nobody else had been able to help. Not the doctors and not their drugs, which had sent Mary dashing out on manic credit-card sprees one week, only to rip the ground from under her feet the next.
Mary had died as Ned had always told Clara. Only she hadn’t gone to heaven, because according to the Catholic Church into which Mary had been born, the circumstances of her death had made that impossible.
And the circumstances – the details, which Ned hadn’t told Clara or Ellen – were that Mary had killed herself. It cramped Ned’s stomach in pain to think about it, to remember how he’d come home from work to find Clara lying helpless on her back in the middle of the kitchen floor, exhausted and fast asleep. He’d known there and then what had happened, hadn’t needed to go upstairs to see for himself. But still he’d gone, step by step, first sighting and then following the white electric extension cord which had led from the bedroom into the bathroom.
The whole truth was that Ned had found Mary Thomas – the same quick-witted, dark-haired beauty he’d fallen in love with, had set up a business with and had wanted to spend the rest of his life with – scorched and dead in the bath, with an electric hairdryer still gripped tightly in her dead hand. There’d been a piece of paper on the bathroom chair, with the single word ‘SORRY’ scrawled across it in Mary’s handwriting.
‘Hey, mate!’
Ned looked round, the beach sliding back into focus, the memory of Mary fading from the space it had occupied in the waves. He watched the lighthouse over on St Catherine’s Island flash and realised it was getting dark.
‘Look out!’
But whoever it was who’d shouted out the warning, it was too late. Just as Ned was starting to stand, he was knocked flat on his back. His head hit the sand with a thud.
‘What the –’ he started to say, but there was no point: he already knew what the warning had been about.
Wobbles stared down at him, his paws on Ned’s shoulders, dribbling slobber on to his chin before licking the entire length of Ned’s face.
‘Are you all right?’
Ned peered up. A teenage boy stood over him, peering down. The hood of his parka was up, but his face was plainly visible. Something about him looked familiar to Ned, but he couldn’t quite place him.
‘Get off,’ Ned told the dog, pushing him aside and scrabbling to his feet.
Wobbles hurtled across the beach into the shallows and started to bark at the waves, and Ned stood up. The boy was roughly the same height as him and they stared into each other’s eyes.
‘He was over in the car park, trying to get at the bins,’ the teenager told him. ‘I saw you lying here and guessed he was yours, so I chased him over.’
‘Thanks.’
The teenager studied his face. ‘You’re the bloke in charge of the refit up at the old Appleforth place, aren’t you?’
Ned smiled at the use of the word refit, like he’d been doing nothing more complicated than changing the spark plugs on a car all these months. ‘That’s right,’ he said, still trying to work out where he knew the teenager’s face from. ‘I’m Ned Spencer.’
‘Yeah, I thought so. I go walking up there sometimes.’
Ned pinched his brow, suddenly feeling faint. He was confused, disjointed, as if the completed jigsaw of his day had been stamped on and scattered. He pictured Ellen standing by the arbour; he heard her questioning him in the pub; and then he saw Mary again, floating face upwards in the bath.
The teenager pulled the hood of his coat further down over his face. ‘You’re going catch one hell of a cold if you stay out in this, you know.’
‘In what?’ Ned asked.
But the teenager had already started walking back along the beach towards the town.
Ned touched his clothes, uncomprehendingly at first, as he felt the cold water which had soaked them through. And it was only then that he looked up at the sky and understood what the teenager had been talking about: it was tipping down with rain.
And that was when Ned remembered where he knew the kid’s face from: he was the one he’d seen hanging around the cliff-side chapel up on the Appleforth Estate, the one he’d been meaning to catch up with and talk to.
But it was too
late now. The boy was twenty yards away already, fading like a ghost into the rain.
Chapter XI
THEY WERE STANDING in the drawing room of Appleforth House and Ellen was biting down on the same apologetic smile she’d been wearing since she’d got off the phone to Thomas Stirling’s mother a minute ago.
‘You’re kidding, right?’ Jimmy asked her.
Ellen looked from black top hat in her right hand to the absurdly long grey coat and the heavy flannel breeches in her left. She shook her head.
The clothes Ellen was wearing – high-heeled black leather boots, a brown suede skirt with a slit up one side and a cream T-shirt and a loose cardigan, patterned with plastic amber beads – looked strikingly modern in comparison. And this was a fact which Jimmy, wearing worn, torn jeans and a cotton hoodie, was tempted to point out right now.
Instead, he glanced at Scott, who was over in the corner, setting up a big overhead lamp, which Jimmy now recognised and was able to name as a chimera. As well as its name, he knew how powerful it was, just as he now knew the names and wattage of the smaller lamps, which he’d seen Scott using before for lighting indoor shots: the redhead (eight hundred watts) and the blonde-head (two kilowatts).
It was Thursday and, earlier in the week, Jimmy had helped Ellen and Scott on two interviews they’d done, one with Michael Francis over in his freak shop on Southcliffe Street and the other with the enthusiastic new vicar in the vestry of St Mary’s church. Jimmy had got up to speed on working as part of a team, but even so, surely what he was being asked to do now was going above and beyond the call of duty. ‘Tell me she’s joking,’ he begged Scott.
But all Scott could muster was a helpless shrug. ‘She’s the boss,’ he said. ‘And, hey, it could be worse,’ he pointed out, ‘at least she’s not asking you to play the female lead.’ Shooting him an amused grin, he turned his back on Jimmy and called over his shoulder, ‘Mind you, Jimmy, you never know … that little feathery hat that Verity’s gonna be wearing might kinda suit you.’
Jimmy groaned.
‘What’s that about my hat?’ Verity called out on hearing her name.
