‘Tell me again what you know,’ she pleaded. ‘Please, from the start.’
The policemen glanced at one another. Perhaps they were weary, having already told her twice. They could tell her twenty times and still Eva would be unable make sense of their words.
‘The only facts we have, Mrs Fitzgerald, are those our Kenyan counterparts passed on,’ the first policeman said. ‘All we have been told is that your daughter was found in a parked car with the engine running inside her garage. The windows were closed except one rear window open wide enough to fit a hose leading from the exhaust pipe. Presumably a coroner’s inquest report is being prepared but, like I say, the Kenyan police seem keen to stress that the case is clear-cut.’
‘That my daughter committed suicide?’
The policeman looked at his colleague for support. ‘Sadly this is what the evidence points to. We can’t investigate this matter, ma’am. The Colonies are not within our jurisdiction. We can only report what we are told.’
‘Then you’ve been told wrong.’ Eva was surprised by the momentary anger in her tone because she felt almost detached from the scene, as if the chill in her bones was her body’s way of masking grief, its anaesthetic against an anguish making her want to howl. ‘I know my daughter. Hazel would never commit suicide. She simply wasn’t a quitter.’
The policemen’s gaze was apologetic but firm. ‘The truth, ma’am, is that we often know people but we don’t know their circumstances or state of mind. That is why we were anxious to personally deliver these letters to you … in case they shed light. Lundy is a long way from Kenya. The letters – or drafts, because all appear to be written in one night – suggest that your daughter was enduring considerable personal anguish. They are dated three days before her death. They must still have been in her wastepaper bin because the police took them away as potential evidence. I think the Kenyan police initially thought the final draft was a suicide note. It was the only letter not crumpled up. It was neatly sealed in an envelope on her dressing table, with your name on it. Your son-in-law didn’t want to open it as it was addressed to you. He claims that he and your daughter had a row that night over some jewellery which straitened financial circumstances compelled him to sell. I sense that a considerable quantity of drink was consumed. He went to bed and woke next morning to find your daughter dead in the back seat of the car, her head on a pillow, her body clad in a nightdress but wrapped tight in a thick woollen blanket as if she felt cold and wanted to stay warm. You have a million questions and I wish we could answer them. But I think it best if you phone your son-in-law. He may be able to put your mind to rest about the details of this tragedy. In the meantime, your granddaughter is being cared for by her father, a Mr Llewellyn, I believe.’
Eva nodded. In her mind she could picture Geoffrey consoling Alex, allowing the child to talk when she wished to and sitting with her in silence in other moments when what she needed most was a reassuring presence. She could picture the blue blossoms of the jacaranda tree overlooking the veranda in the courtyard of Geoffrey’s house: Juma, the houseboy, and the cook and gardener all being there for Alex – like Eva desperately wished she could be – wrapping the child up in unspoken love. What she could not picture was the man whom Hazel wed after her first marriage collapsed. Hazel used to grow irritated on the phone when Eva claimed not to remember being introduced to him at the Colonial Club. But he had made no impression on Eva back then, being merely another white drinker. All Eva knew was that he was older than Hazel and his farm had been granted to him by the European Agricultural Settlement Board in the 1950s when what was then called the Colony and Protectorate of Kenya tried to bolster numbers of white settlers. Hazel had told Eva this in the phone conversation in which she announced her marriage: her voice sounding exultant when describing the new life she planned for herself, but Eva had sensed a brittleness behind her cheery tone. Her happiness in that phone call had lacked the unsoiled joyous expectation that Eva remembered in Hazel’s voice on the morning she had wed Geoffrey in Dublin.
‘Have you been to Kenya?’ she asked both policemen who shook their heads.
‘I did my National Service in Southern Rhodesia,’ the first one said.
‘You got lucky,’ his colleague replied. ‘I only got sent as far as Cyprus, which, to be honest, was hot enough for me.’ He turned to Eva, apologetically. ‘Sorry, ma’am, I’m straying from the point.’
‘You’re making my point,’ she said. ‘If you found Cypress warm, then imagine the heat of Kenya. I know July is the coldest month there and temperatures can plummet at night. But would you really wrap yourself up tight in a thick woollen blanket, no matter how distressed you are, especially when alcohol coursing through your bloodstream would already make you feel so hot?’
The policeman shrugged uncomfortably. ‘Mrs Fitzgerald, as a policeman I can’t really comment on another force’s investigation. I came here out of compassion, with the sad duty of ensuring that you are officially informed of your daughter’s death.’
‘I didn’t ask you as a policeman,’ Eva said quietly. ‘Are you a father?’
‘I have a daughter, yes. She’s seven.’
‘Then I’m asking you as a father.’
He glanced at his compatriot. ‘Well, the woollen blanket raised a few red flags for me. Not so much its heaviness as the description of how tightly wrapped up she was. I would have been keen to rule out any possibility of her having been rolled up inside it by persons unknown. But the Kenyan police report contains no suggestion of malefaction by any third party, no evidence of anything except death by misadventure.’
This time Alan spoke, framing words he knew that Eva barely dared to utter. ‘Would evidence exist if Hazel passed out unconscious on a bed and someone wrapped her in a blanket to make it easier to carry her down to the garage?’
‘That’s speculation I can’t engage in, sir. In Britain the garage would be sealed off, the hosepipe checked for fingerprints. I’m sure similar procedures were followed by the local police who seem to have found no grounds for suspicion.’ He turned to Eva. ‘Perhaps you might finish reading the letters, ma’am, in case they reveal anything of your daughter’s state of mind.’
The man’s voice seemed distant as Eva closed her eyes to recall Hazel as a child wrapping herself as tightly as possible in the blankets at Glanmire House after Eva finished cradling her soles to get them warm. Hazel, the plucky blend of mischief and courage; the blonde bombshell stock-car racing driver; the white butterfly fluttering down a Wicklow hillside with Max on their bicycles, freewheeling away from her. Eva could almost hear Hazel’s resentful tone saying: ‘You accepted Francis’s decision to die. You cradled his body, relieved the world could no longer hurt him. Yet even now you treat me different, spending more time arguing with the police than mourning my death’. But Eva knew their deaths were different. Francis’s suicide was a methodically chosen last resort. If Hazel committed suicide, it must have been an impulsive lashing out at life. Maybe she simply intended to scare her new husband and had threatened to do this, expecting him to rush into the garage and find her in time? Eva would never know for sure because Kenya was a closed fist: a world that dealt with secrets in its own way. There was enough political upheaval without the authorities worrying about some white woman’s fate. Eva picked up the penultimate letter, trying to visualise Hazel at her writing desk late at night, stubborn even in her determination to finish a letter in which she didn’t know what to say, because how do you ask for help when it is not in your character, when all your life you have needed to be the strong one in the family whom everyone else leaned on?
The Argyllshire Farmstead
Kitale
Trans-Nzoia County
Kenya
7th July, 1970
Dear Mummy,
You have never set foot in my home, but remember how I described the train tracks running parallel to the road for a mile. The night train to Nairobi runs past after midnight. It is possibly the only t
hing still functioning on time since independence. A level crossing leads to the dirt track entrance to our lands. On certain nights it became a challenge for me to outdrive that train and swing across the level crossing before it reached there. A silly game really played on nights when I cannot bear to sit among the same faces in the damned club, half of them not talking to me since my first marriage failed but all of them knowing my business, the reasons why my second marriage is on the rocks; their smug judgmental sense that maybe I never belonged among them after all.
So on the few nights when I still go there, sometimes I finish drinking before anyone else is ready to head off for what passes for home here. I leave the lights of that club and suddenly I’m alone in the African night that is like no darkness in Mayo. I remember back to a night when the man whom I later had the misfortune to marry had a few Scotches too many and I thought it wise to drive him home to this farm, never suspecting that this farm would one day become my home. I remember how nothing was moving across the dark landscape that night except the shafts of light from railway carriages as the night train trundled past on its way to Nairobi. It was on that first night that he dared me to race the train, claiming nobody could beat it to the level crossing. He was wrong: I beat it, never able to resist a dare. Even as a child I needed to push myself to test the true horizons of my world. Or maybe to get your attention because you were always too wrapped up in Francis and while I loved Francis to bits that didn’t mean I hadn’t the right to feel jealous. Though even if I had to play second fiddle as a child, I fared better than Daddy, who always played third fiddle in your affections. It wouldn’t have taken much to make Daddy content really, but to be fair I’m not sure anything you could have ever done would have made me truly content. For me there always had to be something extra. I don’t mean more wealth or status or any of that silly stuff, but a new horizon, another test, more zest and zing and jizz and jazz, more to life than just this.
I’ve always wanted to live every minute of every day. Maybe that’s a childish expectation now when I’m no child anymore. I’ll soon not even be a young woman anymore. Thirty-seven last birthday. Forty lurking out there: an uninvited intruder. Thirty-seven probably doesn’t seem old to you, but even at an impossibly young age, I always felt somehow older than you, somehow responsible because somebody in our family needed to be. I didn’t have a great track record of predecessors, you must admit. Poor Francis, who tried so hard but was too easily wounded to handle life. Daddy, chronically unable to handle money or drink or show affection. Your two brothers unable to see the ugly truth behind their communist utopia. Your father hiding away behind his Walt Whitman poems or your mother keeping life at bay with beekeeping and séances. It’s no wonder you never really grew up, Mummy, but out here I’ve had no choice.
I’m getting like you, rabbiting on to avoid the issue. It makes no odds I suppose because it’s late and I know this letter will probably end up crumpled in the bin like all the others. So let me cut to the quick. It is not earth-shattering news – although definitely jaw-shattering. Foolish pride prevented me from writing before now – a last vestige of vanity. Lots of women my age are beaten up inside, I just happen to now also look beaten up on the outside. A map of my recent life is stitched across my left check. I remember people calling me a bombshell: now the expression would be a bombsite. I could always turn heads but I turn them now for the wrong reason. Because there comes a time when you can’t outrun trains any longer, when your wits and reflexes and instincts let you down. There comes a night when no one is sitting beside you in that car daring you to take on the train, when the only person you are still trying to prove something to is yourself. When you think you will still make it to the level crossing in time; just like in the past when your car rattled across the wooden sleepers and reached the other side safely with seconds to spare. And by taking that risk you’ll have proven your worth to yourself again and you will sit there, quietly pumped with adrenaline, not even bothering to look back at the startled faces of the passengers heading off on their long train journey, leaving you stranded on that red dirt road.
The reality, Mummy, is that I could have chickened out at any time, especially with nobody there to witness my test of courage. There was a second, or a lucid fragment of a second, when I knew I was not going to make it, that my reflexes and the battered engine of the Bentley had finally failed me, that I was beaten and the time had finally come to back down. But I could not back down because my character does not possesses a reverse gear. In that last second I knew the train would hit the back of the car, which would overturn. I also knew the train wouldn’t stop and I’d be trapped there until men finally cut me out from the wreckage. Such pain, Mummy, bones broken, my face a mess of blood; my face that was once loved. It’s a fickle thing, love. But I am not fickle. I am who I am and if I could start a car again and hold the wheel steady with my shattered wrist I’d go straight back to that crossing and race the train again. I refuse to be beaten. Even if I knew I no longer had the pace and was certain that train would hit me head on, I’d still put my foot to the floor rather than back down. Because that’s who I am, because – to use the word you tried to instil in your art classes – that’s my character and, despite your fears expressed years ago, let me tell you one thing: I’ve never lost my character…
A knock sounded on the kitchen door as Eva finished reading. The boatman was apologetic for disturbing them but anxious to know if anyone wished to be rowed out to the M.V. Lundy Gannet which could delay its departure no longer. Eva knew the policemen were keen to start their journey back to London. They had gone out of their way to find her when they could easily have let the local Devon police break this news. One reached across to softly touch her knuckles that were turning white from how tightly she gripped this letter – Hazel’s words made more precious because Hazel had never wished her to glimpse this despair.
‘If you’d like us to accompany you back to London, ma’am, your friend could help you to pack quickly. In London you can phone Kenya and have all your questions answered.’
‘I think Mrs Fitzgerald needs some time on her own,’ Alan said. ‘We’ll travel back very soon.’
The policeman nodded. ‘I understand.’ He turned to Eva. ‘We’ll give your friend the High Commissioner’s contact details in Nairobi. You’re in shock. You need time to absorb this news. But we can have someone call to see you in London if we receive any more information. Maybe you could give us your permanent address. Where is your actual home?’
‘I don’t know.’ Eva felt too weak to rise from the table. ‘My home rather got lost along the way. I don’t seem to have one.’
‘I will look after Mrs Fitzgerald and take care of matters from here,’ Alan said. ‘Please use my address as your point of contact if more information arises. I think she needs to be left alone now.’
‘Thank you, sir. It’s a terrible shock for the lady. This is one part of my job I hate.’
His colleague rose and picked up his hat. ‘We’re sorry for your trouble, ma’am. To be honest, I wasn’t sure if giving you these letters would do more harm than good. But they may clarify some things for you so that in time all of this will make sense. If it’s any consolation, in my line of work I’ve learnt that sometimes things never make sense, no matter how hard we try, and if we try too hard we end up inventing theories just to give ourselves an explanation because we find it so hard to live with the simple truth that human beings are complex and often do things for complex reasons that even they don’t understand. I hope you find your answers, but maybe in time you’ll just have to live with the harshest truth of all, which is that certain things are unknowable. My sincerest condolences, Mrs Fitzgerald.’
The two policemen shook her hand and walked out the open doorway with Alan. She saw the boatman signal out to sea and one policeman open his notebook to jot down Alan’s address. Alan remained standing in the doorway, observing the three men hurry down the path. He seemed to be watching to check if
the boatman could row them out in time, but Eva knew that he understood her well enough to give her this time alone. He understood loneliness: something she thought she understood before but now realised that she about to truly learn. Because until now her daughter was always a long-distance phone call away – no matter how strained those calls could be, how little she and Hazel agreed on and how far apart their worlds had grown. Now there was just a void. Eva tried to push through this pain by remembering how, even within this void, there was still Alex: a precious child who must surely be traumatised. Something of Hazel’s spirit would live on inside Alex as she grew to become a young woman. Eva clung to this sliver of comfort, to the sense of purpose that somehow – even if penniless and on the other side of the world – she would do everything to be there for Alex if the child ever needed her.
With the policemen gone, her body trembled so much in shock that she barely had enough strength to pick up the final letter Hazel wrote: the one in pristine condition despite the numerous hands that surely held it over the past fortnight, scrutinising each word in search of a foretelling of what occurred three nights after it was written. But Eva knew her daughter well enough to sense that, if Hazel had placed this letter in an envelope to be posted, it would contain no chink to reveal the anguish hinted at in previous drafts. She knew this as surely as she knew that Alan would remain in that doorway, seemingly intent on watching the boat row out to the ship, but really allowing her the privacy to read these words and cry now that there was no one to see. He would not bother her with platitudinous comforts but wait patiently for the moment when she had absorbed these final words. Only then would he judge it right to turn and walk back into the kitchen to offer her the unadorned companionship of a lonely man.
An Ark of Light Page 28
